RWBY S6E3: “The Lost Fable (part two)”
Gonna try and finish this today so I can still fit in two other reviews this week. Onward!
The newly assembled Bostonian militia charges into Creator's domain, where they are met by both of the brother gods in their dragon forms. The duo ask them who the brains behind this rather brainless operation might be, and Boston herself strides confidently to the front of her army. The brothers are not happy to see her. Boston casts magic missile, and on cue her soldiers all start shooting and blasting as well.
Not a single spell or magically-infused arrow strikes home, however. Destroyer just sucks them all into his raised claw, and expresses disappointment at the humans using "his own gift" against him. Well...so far, we've seen more destructive applications of magic than any other kind, so I guess it having been granted by him makes more sense than most of the other divine actions thus far. He's now regretting that act of generosity (Destroyer always seems to end up regretting his acts of generosity, doesn't he? I mean, this time it makes a whole hell of a lot more sense than the previous, but either way, it's a pattern). And, with a mere hand motion, he takes magic away from humanity again. All magic, from all humans, everywhere. There's a montage of (distractingly still) images from all over the ancient world being swept over by a purple anti-magic wave.
Back in Creator's realm, Boston picks herself up off the ground, and sees that her entire army has been disintegrated. She vows to go out there and raise another, but Destroyer tells her that...oh. Okay, I misinterpreted that visual. He wasn't taking everyone's magic away. He was exterminating all of humanity besides her.
Hmm. These gods also seem to be a lot more powerful than I'd have expected from the pagan/fairy tale framing. They're absolutely nowhere near omniscience, but they're quite a bit closer to omnipotence than I'd have thought. I figured they'd have to work through floods or storms or armies of souped-up grimm or something, but no, just a finger snap.
As Boston struggles to comprehend what just happened, the gods tell her that this world is now just a Remnant of what it once was (hmm...honestly, Remnant makes more sense as a name for her than a new name for the world. The planet itself doesn't seem to have been devastated, the people have just been unmade). They tell her that they will learn from this experience, and that they hope she will have learned from hers.
Then they leave, and Destroyer blows up the moon.
Why did he blow up the moon? I don't know. Maybe just as a reminder to Boston that the world will never be as it once was and it's all her fault? I guess?
The shattered moon was literally the first onscreen image in all of RWBY after the intro narration (I'll get back to THAT topic in a bit, by the way). It was made to seem really important. And it turns out that it's shattered because...one of the gods felt like shattering it, for no particularly obvious reason. It happened concurrently with something significant to the backstory, but it seems to have basically no significance of its own.
...well, okay. We do see some of the smaller broken fragments crashing down to the surface of Remnant. If it turns out that that's where Dust came from or something, then that would make the broken moon actually have some significance of its own.
But okay now, that intro.
…
“The intro to the first episode of the entire show. Let me just quote it for you, it’s not long.
Legends. Stories scattered through time. Mankind has grown quite fond of recounting the exploits of heroes and villains, forgetting so easily that we are remnants, byproducts, of a forgotten past.
Man, born from dust, was strong, wise, and resourceful, but he was born into an unforgiving world. An inevitable darkness — creatures of destruction — the creatures of Grimm - set their sights on man and all of his creations. These forces clashed, and it seemed the darkness was intent on returning man’s brief existence to the void.
However, even the smallest spark of hope is enough to ignite change, and in time, man’s passion, resourcefulness, and ingenuity led them to the tools that would help even the odds. This power was appropriately named “Dust”. Nature’s wrath in hand, man lit their way through the darkness, and in the shadow’s absence came strength, civilization, and most importantly, life.”
So, the first paragraph matches what we've just seen fairly well. The next iteration of humanity might not be literal remnants of the old (unless Boston is actually the Eve of humanity mk II), but in the "spiritual successors" sense it works. Then we're told about how they tell stories and legends about heroes and villains, while having forgotten their TRUE past.
And then, she tells us about what I assume is the next version of humanity appearing in the world, beginning to thrive, but then being hunted to near extinction by the grimm until the discovery of Dust turned the tide.
For now let's overlook the fact that Dust's role in grimm-defeating was almost immediately downplayed by the overwhelming focus on aura and semblances. The intro is telling us that the forgotten past is primitive, pre-dust humanity mk II struggling to survive. Okay, sure; that's probably what the most learned of Remnant's historians and archaeologists would tell you. But this narrator isn't one of Remnant's historians or archaeologists. The narrator is Boston.
IE, one of the only two individuals in the world who knows that this isn't actually the real beginning.
So, it works for her, like, lording it over the younger version of mankind. But when Boston talks about "forgotten past" and only starts at the place that isn't actually forgotten or unknown, it's just....what? Wouldn't it have made more sense to structure this as her starting with that account, and then smugly followed it with "That's what mankind thinks. But the true darkness that came before them is one unknown to them, and now etc etc" or something?
Well, no, it wouldn't have. Because there is absolutely no way in hell that the writers had any idea where Boston came from, why the moon was shattered, or how humanity in Remnant came to be at that time (or, if they did, those answers were completely different). Sure, they obviously knew that there'd been some kind of apocalypse at some point in the past (hence the name Remnant), and that there was an immortal witch lady to be the antagonist/narrator. But everything else, including the almost shocking insignificance of the moon's breaking given how much buildup that got, was invented no earlier than season 4 at the very best. And, as always, the writers' lack of attention to what they'd been doing up until that point shows.
Also, on a somewhat related - but less disparaging - note: is that Jen Taylor doing the genie's voice as well? Sure sounds like her.
...
Boston spends a while wondering the world in accursed solitude, watching the grimm sort of meander around restlessly in the empty, crumbling cities and villages. Presumably not sure what to do with themselves now that there are no humans left in them.
Either grimmrocs are surprisingly light, or those houses just have a decorative wooden layer over the titanium.
I wonder what's up with the grimm's specifically anti-human instincts? Maybe that was the result of another arbitrary collective punishment from Destroyer sometime earlier?
Anyway, she wanders around, cursing "everyone and everything but herself." Genie is still being way harsh. Boston was exceedingly reckless in trying to do what she did, but considering just how overwhelmingly disproportionate the consequences were even going by the gods' previous behavior I really can't assign her that much blame. Eventually, she ventures back to Destroyer's lair, where the pools of black tar that the grimm are born from get her attention. If Creator dipped her in his own little pond when he made her immortal (which he did. It just wasn't made to seem at all significant at the time, so it seemed like they just dropped her into water to be extra petty, but...okay, I guess that was actually how he did it), then she reasons that maybe Destroyer's mud puddle can kill her again.
It can't, obviously. That would have been a pretty massive oversight on the gods' part, considering that quite a few of those puddles seemed to be sheltered from Destroyer's inner sanctum by quite a bit of mountain and she could have conceivably come back jumped into one without him noticing. The brother gods' sensory ability seem to be (by far) the most limited thing about them, after all.
Also, those pools are called the "Brothers Grimm" for some reason. Maybe it's supposed to have an apostrophe after the s, for "the grimm belonging to the brothers?" That would make some amount of in-universe sense. Moreso than most of the folkloric references in this show, certainly.
Anyway, Boston's dive into the Brothers(' ?) Grimm did not kill her, but turned her monochrome, gave her weird hair spike things, and (according to Genie) instilled her with a thirst for pure destruction. Henceforth, she would be known as Boston Massacre.
In time, Genie continues, Boston Massacre would find herself an intractable opponent. Then she falls silent, and it cuts to an extremely gormless looking Ozma silhouetted against the void.
Creator appears before him, and tells him that he is in "the space between realms." He then informs him, in this really mournful and apologetic voice that "there has been a tragedy."
...
Okay, I'm going to hand it to Rooster Teeth here. For all the illogic of this backstory up until now, just this one line and its delivery turned the brother gods into one of the most earnestly hateable antagonists I've ever seen. In anything. This is how you make a truly loathsome villain. Dunno if the direction is to credit with this, or just the voice actor going above and beyond, but damn. That actually gave me chills.
He also follows it up immediately by saying that "his brother" has exterminated humanity, and once again his tone of voice and body language really convincingly make it seem like he tried to stop Destroyer from doing that, and regrets having not succeeded. Which in truth he absolutely did not, and in fact explicitly approved of what Destroyer did at the time.
Killing the gods themselves might be beyond the scope of where RWBY ever goes. But with this presentation, ending the story any way other than dethroning them would necessarily give the show an undertone of horror that it would otherwise never have. The knowledge that the universe is controlled by a being with this level of malice and deceitfulness, and that it always will be, is just outright cosmic horror.
...
Creator says that he and his brother plan to remove their physical selves from this world, now. Before they do though, he'd like to offer Ozma a deal. Humanity, he says, will eventually grow back again (does he mean that they're going to create more humans before leaving? Or that Boston, despite her new Massacre state, can still have normal human children? Unclear), but without the nearness of Creator and Destroyer mankind will only ever be able to become a fraction of what it once was. Uh huh. Sure. He offers to send Ozma back to this remnant of a world equipped with four divine artifacts that represent the four ideals on which humanity was first designed: creation, destruction, knowledge, and choice. Half of those aren't really ideals, and the other half are things that neither of the brother gods have been shown to care for, but whatever. He'll resurrect Ozma (OH NO BUT THE CYCLE! THE BALANCE OF LIFE AND DEATH!), give him the artifacts, and appoint him the stewart of this new humanity, however it's supposed to come into being.
When the four artifacts are united and activated in tandem, the brother gods will be summoned back into the world, and humanity will receive a second judgement. Or...um...a first judgement, if this is a new and different humanity that's being created? I'm still confused about where these new people are going to be coming from. If, when the brothers return, humankind has...
...
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cutting this here. finish tomorrow. brain too broken right now.
Jaune asking what aura is didn't frustrate me this much.
