RWBY S6E3: “The Lost Fable (part three)”

Most of RWBY's issues are not unique to itself. Other media makes a lot of these same mistakes. RWBY might commit these writing and direction sins more often than most similar things, but usually it doesn't seem fundamentally different from the many other bad shows out there. And there are a few shows out there that are worse in these conventionally flawed ways.

But, once every great while, RWBY does something so incomprehensibly, unbelievably, monolithically stupid, seemingly without any irony or self awareness, that I am actually unable to process it. As you've probably noticed, I'm pretty prone to hyperbole and comedic exaggeration, but I'm being serious now when I say that RWBY has had a few moments that I literally could not analyze until I'd had a day or so to mull it over, because it just broke my brain that badly. Other shows have done this to me, but RWBY remains the only one to have done it more than once. In fact, I'm pretty sure that this makes it the third time.

RWBY season 1, episode 6. When Jaune didn't know what aura was, despite ostensibly having been lived his whole life in a world that basically runs on it, and having been raised by a family of professional aura-using warriors whose lives depend on it day to day. Delivered simultaneously with a surprise introduction to a totally new magic system that shattered the audience's understand of the worldbuilding up to that point and highlighted the first of what would eventually become many, many outright lies told in RWBY's in-universe history lessons (most of which are relayed directly to the audience in a style that *usually* indicates the voice of the author).

RWBY season 4, episode 5. Sure, season 3 was the most insulting and frustrating overall (by far!) out of the ones I sat through, but it didn't have any one moment that was quite this transcendentally and multilaterally bad. With Penny's baffling demise, Cinder's bullshit supervirus, and Ozpin's everything, you could at least sort of see what the writers might have been trying to go for. The battleship hiijacking nonsense, the lying aura scoreboards, and the truly hilarious battlefield-cell-phone-conversation scene, meanwhile, were all attributable to writer-animator miscommunication. It wasn't until I stopped the Let's Watch and speedwatched on ahead into season 4 that RWBY would do something quite this stunning again That being the revelation that Blake is the princess of Fantasy Australia. Like, her parents are public figures, as the leaders of an (impoverished and largely refugee, but still very much politically topical) nation. And Blake Belladonna is her real name, no pseudonyms. That was the only one thing since The Only Muggle At Hogwarts that genuinely made me wonder how actual human beings could have possibly created this.

And now, this. RWBY season 6, episode 3.

...

Creator gives Ozma the four artifacts, and tells him that when the four are united and activated at once, Creator and Destroyer will return to remnant in person and give humanity its final judgement. If they have finally learned to put aside their differences and work together, then the brother gods will set up residence again and give everyone the rest of their magic back. If they are still quarrelsome and divided, they will be permanently eradicated without any remaining exceptions this time.

If they've learned to work together.

...

What merits this scene's inclusion on the short list of Peak RWBY incidents is that, unlike the usual misrepresentations and retcons that contradict previous episodes or arcs, this directly and diametrically contradicts the core substance of a scene that happened less than two minutes prior. Humanity wasn't found wanting because they fought among themselves. They were found wanting for the exact opposite of that; because they had unified themselves against the gods. Boston actually got most or all of the world to cooperate toward a common goal, and now Creator is saying that we need to atone for our transgression by learning to cooperate toward common goals.

I looked at the Youtube comments to see if anyone had any way of interpreting this that came close to making even the most obtuse kind of sense. The most satisfying one I found was someone saying that this wasn't "true" unity, because Boston was just manipulating everyone else for her own ends. And, if this was actually what we saw happening, that might kind of work as an explanation. But, really, it isn't. Boston lied about the specifics of how she got her immortality, but she seems to have been earnest in her belief that they could all share in it if they dethroned the gods. And, even if she was lying about that part too, that element of deception would have only been a minor detail in the causation of the event that humanity was actually wiped out for.

If Creator had said "we will see if you have learned gratitude" or "humanity must learn not to strike against that which it doesn't understand," that would have worked. He and his brother would still be the villains of this story, but that's not a problem; villains can make demands that seem more reasonable to themselves than they actually are, and sometimes a story about having to give the bad guy what he wants to avoid further abuse can be a good one. Depressing, sure, but a lot of good stories are depressing.

But telling Ozma that humanity needs to learn to work together to be forgiven for this transgression isn't even something a narcissistic villain of a divinity would do. It's completely counter to everything else in the story. At best, the story might be trying to do a "the will of the gods is unfathomable" thing, where the gods are supposed to follow an alien logic that only seems like nonsense because of our own limited perspectives. But, the way the human characters react to this doesn't suggest that that's the intent, and neither does the otherwise very limited, emotional, and petty Greek mythology-ish way that the gods are otherwise being portrayed. It feels like the gods' motives are supposed to be, if not just, then at least comprehensible for the humans. Like the authors think that that's what they've actually done.

How could they possibly think that that's what they had actually done?

...

Ozma tells Creator that he has no interest in returning to a mortal world that lacks Boston, and that he'd rather stay in the afterlife and rejoin her. Creator tells him that Boston is actually the only other person who IS still alive, though he might not like her new self nearly as much. Ozma says he'll take his chances with whoever or whatever she's become then, and agrees to Creator's bargain.

...

You know...why did Creator choose Ozma for this offer? Sure, he's supposed to have been a renowned hero figure during his time, and Creator might be inclined to choose such a figure for this kind of job, but is his relationship with Boston really just coincidental to him being chosen?

Especially considering that Creator isn't limited to choosing just from among those wiped out by Destroyer's smiting. Ozma must have died at least few years prior to that, after all, if Boston had time to travel the world and raise that army of hers. So, of all the heroic figures who had ever lived and died, Creator chose Boston's husband because...why?

Also...considering that she herself is still alive, wouldn't doing this be teaching her the opposite lesson of what they originally wanted her to learn? "Keep nagging us, and sooner or later, if you escalate enough, you'll get what you want?" Well, to give this story a chance that it probably doesn't deserve, I guess maybe she doesn't want Ozma back anymore now that she's been grimmified. In that case, this won't be an issue.

...

Anyway. Creator tells Ozma that his resurrection will take a form that he might not be expecting, and that ensures that even without Boston he "will never be alone." Then, Ozma finds himself in the body of a soldier fighting a losing battle to defend a town from some grimm. Disoriented though he his, his master swordsmanship quickly distinguishes himself among his new people, and he seems to become the hero of the hour almost immediately.

Boston was wandering an abandoned, human-less world for what seems to have been some time. I'm not sure if the gods are supposed to have left the world immediately after Destroyer broke the moon, or a little while later, but in either case I don't know when they're supposed to have created more people. Did Boston witness this event? How long was she left on Remnant alone before that happened? Were the gods able to create NuHumanity despite not being there at the time, if indeed they left right after the moon thing? If so, what significance is their physical presence even of?

Also, how long has NuHumanity existed by the time Ozma reincarnated? Is this issue of internecine human conflict a completely new and unrelated issue that's endemic to the mark II version? Wait, no, that couldn't be it: Creator said that Ozma would begin his mission when humanity returns, future tense. So that hadn't happened yet. But there's clearly a fairly developed human society at this point now, so how many generations did Creator wait before actually sending Ozma back? Also, if human-on-human conflict is supposed to be the big challenge now, why is the first thing we're shown when Ozma reincarnates a bunch of humans fighting the grimm?

Also also: this might not be a problem, per se, but it's something that stuck out to me as potentially significant. The implication seems to be that Ozma has been placed in the body of another living human and is now puppeting him. That's not how his possession was shown to work previously, in seasons 4 and 5. There, he started out as a mere voice in the head of his new host, and slowly started taking more and more control of him over time. Here, it seems like Ozma has completely displaced or repressed the host's consciousness altogether, and has total control of the body and little to no access to the host's memories right off the bat. So, either the writers forgot, or the nature of his possession process has changed over the centuries since this (maybe due to Creator no longer personally catalyzing it).

Ozma learns about the new world he's found himself in. The cities are primitive and unimpressive compared to the ones he remembers. People have only very limited magic, using either their auras and semblances, or dust crystals. There are also these animal people called fauni now, and they're kept in cages.

I guess if the fauni ever had a history of their own before human dominance and persecution, it happened during the nebulous period between NuHumanity's mysterious birth and Ozma's return. Otherwise they've just always been slaves, and things seem to have been getting gradually better for them over the centuries. The politics here...well, there's a lot of ways to read this, some of which make the story look better than others, so I'll leave it at that. Politics aside, though, it does feel kind of lazy and perfunctory from a worldbuilding angle.

Almost uniquely among the new humans, Ozma in his new host body could still use his magic as well as ever. And, according to rumors he heard, there was one other with similarly flexible and unbounded powers. The Schnee fami-sorry I meant to say a woman who lived alone in the forest and was known only as "the witch." The witch had a bad reputation, but not of the "active threat to the world" sort so much as "keep out of that part of the woods, she hates intruders." Hoping that this was who he thought it was, Ozma journeyed to the witch's lair and hoped he'd receive a warmer welcome than the others.

And, despite her grimmification, Boston Massacre still loved him. And, despite him being in a completely different body now, she also recognized him on sight. Of this latter detail, Genie says "call it magic, or call it something stronger." I'll call it the writers being too lazy to write out or even just describe the conversation in which he proved his identity to her.

Their reunion is loving, and with Ozma's motivation and assistance she quickly restores the decrepit old cabin she was living in into something much better repaired and more inviting. Despite having moved back in together, the two withheld some key details of their stories. Boston Massacre, for instance, "blamed the destruction of the old world on the gods, fearing he would reject her if he knew the truth."

...

I want this genie to be on fire.

Ruby? Yang? Guys? I'm willing to apologize for most of the things I've said about you if you interrupt the genie's story and just brutally incinerate her right now.

Fuck it, I'll even be okay with Jaune if he helps with the setting on fire. I'll forgive Qrow.

...

For his own part, Ozma doesn't tell Boston Massacre about the four relics he was entrusted with. Speaking of those, where ARE those relics? They didn't seem to appear with Ozma when he took over his new body. We saw at least one of them back in season 5, if not afterward, and it was pretty big, so it's not like he could have had them all in his pocket or whatever. Did Creator preemptively hide them around the world and just tell Ozma where to find them? Maybe, idk. His stated reason for not telling her is that he "wasn't yet sure of where the truth lay."

Um. Did he have any reason to doubt her, aside from the edgy new color palette? If he didn't trust her, why was he willing to move back in and restart his relationship with her? Also, like, didn't this guy reject eternal life if it meant he couldn't be with her? Why is he so skeptical of her now?

Ozma was also, during this time they spent together, thinking of his conversation with Creator. Humanity, from what he'd seen, seemed more divided than ever before.

And, okay, yeah, the show is now explicitly saying that humanity's pre-extermination flaw was its lack of unity. What the fuck.

Boston Massacre tells him that this is a literally godless world, and the people have no one to guide them but themselves. She suggests that they take power, leveraging their immortality and their uniquely versatile magic to essentially do the same thing she did once before. Only, this time, rather than unifying the world to raise a god-killing army, they can essentially become its new gods themselves in the absence of anyone else. They can shape society into a paradise that the brothers never could.

Ozma is happy to hear that, because taking charge of humanity's direction and turning it toward the goal of global harmony and contentment is exactly what Creator wanted him to do. Er, scratch that. Actually, he's repulsed by the idea, and treats it as a dangerous and heretical suggestion.

What...but...that's LITERALLY YOUR JOB, OZMA! Sure, maybe he (understandably) has no interest in bringing the brother gods back, but like...he can still always choose not to, regardless of how peaceful the world has become? Boston Massacre doesn't even know about the artifacts, and if she did I very much doubt that she'd take issue with creating paradise and then just not summoning the brothers.

I guess it could be that Ozma is just against the idea of using his and Boston's powers to become rulers for idealistic reasons. That would be fitting, for a lawful good type like he was said to be. In that case, he was tricking Creator in the first place when he agreed to give it a try. But if he was never actually intending to do it, why did he have that musing session about how humanity was "more divided than ever?"

Genie then says, in a sinister tone, that "the hearts of men are easily swayed," and we see Ozma changing his tune with this sinister framing that suggests that we're supposed to infer Boston Massacre is like, corrupting him.

Cue Ozma and Boston Massacre saving a town from grimm, and using their status as heroes and protectors to gain influence over the people.

You know, if this had cut to the two of them violently conquering the land as warlords in order to force harmony at gunpoint, I'd be able to see how this might run contrary to Creator's intent. But this? Protecting people from monsters and using the status thus afforded to set themselves up as divine leader figures?

Well, it's still authoritarian, don't get me wrong. It's not something I'd want to do in their place, or that I'd want anyone to do in general. But there's no way for Ozma to go about doing as Creator commanded without being some flavor of authoritarian.

Ozma and Boston Massacre's following grew until they were the de facto king and queen of a large and prosperous kingdom. And, despite Boston's monochrome of massacre, she was apparently still human enough to have normal-looking human children with Ozma. Four princesses were born, and by virtue of their parents being mk I humans they developed the ability to use old fashioned magic just like them...

...oh. Those color schemes.

Erm.

...

Okay, two things I'd like to point out here. One is that we've already heard two different versions of the Maidens' origin story back in season 3. One from Pyrrha, which we can assume reflects a simplified pop cultural version of the myth from modern Remnant, and then another, much more protracted, and also substantially different version from Ozpin/Ozma himself. And, just like Boston narrating the pilot episode's intro, he's one of the only two people in the world who could have told us the actual story. His version also happened to be in a World of Remnant episode, in which he was addressing the audience directly.

To be fair, both stories could be true. He could have sucked out his daughters' souls and implanted them into four other random girls he met in a later incarnation or something.

Or, I guess, he could have given some of his powers to said four random girls who happened to remind him of his old daughters for some reason, and the seasonal color schemes being given to the princesses here is just a stupid red herring meant to confuse the audience. That would still be a bit annoying, but better than the alternative.

The other thing I want to point out, though, is that Boston has been a creature with a boundless thirst for destruction ever since she got the Massacre treatment. We know she had a bad reputation during her "witch" period, but no specifics on anything bad she's supposed to have done. And one would assume that if she'd committed any really glaring atrocities, Ozma would have taken her to task for it. And now, she's...co-ruling a thriving civilization and living a happy domestic life with her husband and daughters.

Did that pool actually do anything besides change her color scheme? Where is this "thirst for destruction" we were told about?

...

Well, the next thing we see is a human-on-human battle with plenty of people dying, and Ozma and Boston Massacre watching through a crystal ball. Okay, so it looks like their empire did start spreading through traditionally imperial means after they'd consolidated their initial personality cult in that one region. And their following dialogue makes it seem that this is a war of aggression on their own kingdom's part, invading other countries to bring them into the fold by force. Things didn't stay rosy and merely pink-fuzzy-handcuffs-authoritarian for long, it seems.

So, yeah, this approach is in fact doomed to failure, given the historical resentment and repressive policies that such empire-building inevitably breeds. I'm not sure what exactly Creator wanted Ozma to do, but at a guess I'd say that as a pair of immortals (Boston Massacre being a biological immortal, and Ozma a cyclical one) could conceivably take it slow and come to dominate their neighbors economically and culturally without needing wars of aggression. It would just require a lot of patience, and a lot of progress through trial and error. So yeah, I'm judging them much more harshly now.

Ozma's reluctance starts to come back as he sees the death and misery that they're causing and wonders if they're actually going to make things better in the long run like this.

...

Something just occurred to me though. Earlier, the episode went out of its way to tell us that the fauni are now a thing, and that their treatment is really atrocious even by historical slave society metrics. And I wonder: what what the Bostozmian Empire's policy regarding fauni?

Because, when the genie talks about the mistreatment of the fauni in the same breath as she describes the ramshackle cities and struggling magicless people, it frames it as being one of the inadequacies of this new world that immediately jumped out at Ozma. And, if he acknowledged that faunus mistreatment was wrong, then one ASSUMES he'd probably try to stamp it out in a country that he rules.

Fauni are never mentioned again for the rest of the episode, though. Which leaves us to wonder if Ozma (regardless of whether or not the more callous Boston Massacre cared one way or the other) did anything to correct what he at least seems to have perceived as an evil of the new society, once he had the power to do so.

The lack of followup on the faunus thread in this episode is a big problem, because it has the potential to completely change the moral calculus of this situation. Is the Bostozmian Empire liberating fauni and granting them equal (or even just something approaching equal) citizenship in every land it assimilates? If so, then...well...given just how bad their treatment seems to have been, then I'd say that's worth it. That's worth the cost in lives. Allowing something this evil and this widespread to continue for a few more generations until you can convince the slaveowners nicely to let them go is worse than fighting a bloody war to free them right now, and is likely to create at least as much longterm resentment.

Maybe the Bostozmian laws didn't actually do shit to help fauni. Maybe Boston Massacre convinced Ozma that ending this chattel slavery would make them too unpopular. Maybe the narrator really was just going on an irrelevant tangent back there, and Ozma himself never gave a rat's ass about the fauni. I don't know.

And...the fact that the writers shoehorned this subplot into this episode when they really didn't have to, but then didn't deem it important enough to follow up on when it cames to the characters weighing the moral cost of things is, unfortunately, very, VERY consistent with how RWBY's creators have handled the faunus thing for the entire series.

...

Ozma tells Boston Massacre that this can't be what Creator meant. Boston asks him wtf that's supposed to mean, and he finally tells her about his pact and the relics. And, he makes it very clear that he earnestly wants to bring the gods back and thinks that that would make everything good.

Remember, Ozma doesn't know the details of how the old world got destroyed. As far as he's been told, Destroyer wiped everyone out in a random fit of pique, and Creator couldn't or wouldn't stop him (Creator framed it as him having been unable, lying bastard that he is, but that's not really important to the equation). The impression he's had of how good or bad the presence of the gods would be for humanity should be worse than ours. We at least know that there was SOME kind of provocation before they committed global genocide. He doesn't. And he wants them back anyway.

Well, at the very least, this is consistent characterization. He was a delusional, self-sabotaging idiot in his Ozpin incarnation, so it only fits for him to have been that way in ancient times as well. I guess you don't need intelligence or a sense of perspective to be a legendary hero of the sword-swinging and princess-rescuing kind.

...

Then, Boston Massacre tells him that they shouldn't bother uniting humanity. Presumably, because she does NOT want the gods to come back, and now that she knows that Ozma will try to summon them once he thinks humanity is united she thinks it would be better to not give him the temptatio-

Oh.

No.

What.

I thought that's what she was going to say, but she doesn't say that. Instead, she says "why should we unite an inferior humanity when we can replace them?" Indicating their daughters as she speaks.

...

When she pulled herself out of Lake Grimm as a "creature of pure destruction," I had expected her to start having motivations along these lines. I was surprised and confused when she didn't show any aspirations to do something like this, and wondered what the point of that recolor even was.

But, now the story has her dipping herself in the puddle, being a recluse for however many decades or centuries (how many generations old was NuHumanity when Ozma reappeared? And, where did they even come from? Oh, who even cares anymore...), and then reconnecting with her old husband, raising children, and being a semi-benevolent dictator. She wasn't a good person in this time, particularly. Depending on some of the unspecified details, she could have been a pretty bad one. But not in any sort of pure-evil-seeker-of-destruction way. Not in any hateful way. She was a dangerous recluse, and then she was a conqueror. That's just normal human evil, and it seems to have been balanced by positive traits throughout. You know, like most of the people you read about in history books.

And now, an untold number of years after the grimmification, she's just suddenly starting to act like a monster? Was the Massacre-ness a ticking time bomb that waited until the worst possible moment to change her personality? I guess that makes more sense than anything else, but it strikes me as profoundly unsatisfying. Partly because it robs her of any culpability or agency in "her" later villainy. More than that, though, it also makes me wonder what the point of getting into her earlier human motivations and thought processes was. "Kill everyone and replace them with my own children" doesn't flow from any of her previous desires or traits. It's not even a corruption of her earlier motivations, in any way that I can track.

...

So, she tells Ozma that she's decided she wants to kill all the people that she and him had been working (effectively or otherwise) to improve the lives of for years and replace them with a race of horribly inbred mutants from a genetic bottleneck of two. Ozma reacts the way most people would, and tries to smuggle their daughters away from the castle before Boston Massacre can have a son and force them to breed or whatever. She catches him in the act, and a fight breaks out. Ozma bids the princesses to flee, and as they do he and Boston Massacre have a wizard's duel that nearly tears the castle apart from within.

A battle in which she is ultimately victorious.

Ozma gets his second (or...fourth, actually) death at his own wife's hands. Genie tells us that Ozma went through many incarnations since then, and eventually learned to better integrate himself with his hosts (erm...the series has given mixed messages on that front). She also says that no matter where he went or what he did, Boston Massacre's presence could always be felt.

The visuals as she says that are of one of Ozma's later hosts looking out a window and seeing this:

I guess Boston is now responsible for the grimm acting exactly the same way that they've always acted.

Ozma went about finding the artifacts; first by finding the Relic of Knowledge, and then by asking the Genie who dwells within where to find the others (wait...he DIDN'T KNOW WHERE THEY WERE? But...how were they "given" to him in that case? How was any of this ever supposed to...what...). He also knew that humanity could never be united for as long as Boston yet lived (lmao he still wants to bring the gods back what a shitbrain), though. Well, I guess if she still counts as human, and if her now active grimm-ness is making her incapable of not wanting to kill other humans, then that's necessarily true. Does Creator really expect him to unite every individual human, though? If so, then this whole thing is just another cruel prank of his, and Ozma resummoning him could only ever result in immediate human extinction.

I guess her persuasiveness and charisma means that she'll always be able to stir up enough disharmony among others to prevent humanity from meeting the critical threshold of harmony. If that's it, then I guess finding a way to imprison her would be the way to go?

Well, either imprisonment of someone with her ability set is categorically impossible for someone with his ability set (ironic, given that he first met her by rescuing her from imprisonment...), or he was just too stupid to think of this. Probably the latter; this is Ozpin that we're talking about, after all.

The story ends with him asking the Genie Of Knowledge And Highly Questionable Moralizing how to kill Boston Massacre, and her telling him that it can only be done by the gods who made her immortal in the first place, and who will exterminate humanity if she's still alive when they're summoned.

You know what would have made more sense? If, rather than that WTF eugenics out of nowhere plot, Boston just kept her previous desire: wanting to die. Say, the grimmification made her incapable of feeling hope or happiness anymore (oh hey! this would even tie in with that "grimm have an affinity for negative emotions" shtick that the show's never quite been willing to commit to!), so that her reunion with Ozma meant nothing to her and she brushed him off. Then, when she somehow found out about the artifacts, she started trying to gather them so that the gods will hopefully kill her along with everyone else.

Maybe that actually is her goal by the time of the series proper. It fits the actions she's taken as the central antagonist of RWBY. Throughout the seasons that I saw, she was trying to steal the four relics from their vaults and simultaneously stir up lots of conflict between various human and faunus factions. But then...what? She arbitrarily lost her deathwish in favor of a eugenicswish, and then arbitrarily switched back to the deathwish sometime after the backstory that we've been shown? What even is the point of giving the villain a dedicated backstory episode if it DOESN'T end with her taking up the villainous goal that defines her in the time of the series?

Also, that genie looks fucking terrible. The end.


At the halfway point of this episode, I said that it felt like a fairy tail told by someone suffering from dementia. Having now finished it, I've revised that assessment. It's more like a fairy tail that was written by a computer. Like someone fed a bunch of mythological story beats to an algorithm, and it arranged them in a way that aligned to the not-specific-enough parameters it was coded with. Everything follows from the thing that happened before in the basic sense of "we ended with the characters in this situation, and now the next story beat takes them from there to somewhere else," but there's no sense of why. Like, it can arrange the pieces and find+replace the names of the characters, but isn't smart enough to do any editing beyond that. It's plotting a la Harry Potter and The Portrait of What Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash.

I don't think that that's what actually happened. Coding an algorithm to make a story for you sounds like a lot more work than just writing a damned story, after all, and if there's one thing that RWBY's writing team dislikes, it's work. So, what WAS the creative process here, then? Did they put on blindfolds and reach into a hat full of story beats? Did they throw darts at a board? Did one of them write a Mad Libs thing for the other to fill out? I don't know.

I guess that this is why I've always had such an extreme reaction to RWBY. It's not that it necessarily fails worse than other really bad shows. It's that the way that it goes about failing often seems so downright alien. This episode is one of the clearest examples of what I'm talking about out of the whole show. This isn't what it looks like when the authors are hacks. This isn't what it looks like when the authors are stupid. It's not even what it looks like when the authors of a story are stupid hacks (which is all that they seem like, when you see the interviews and such). RWBY defies my understanding of the human condition.