man im reading this while listening to the untold full album and DAMN does it fit

wHoA

Was that a M:TG reference at the end there?

Nope. Done. It got worse. Dont bother reading.

Sometimes I feel like the chapters are getting better, then you do this

I'll summarize ch18 so you dont need to read it; Ruby saves a village and gives a kid named Alec aura.

I take it back

Definitely getting better, but still kinda cringey.

For some odd reason at the end of the page the song “in the name of god by sabaton” popped up in my head lol

The story has had a rather protagonist-centered sense of morality for a good while now, but it gets especially bad in this chapter where Ruby is suddenly OK with killing four random people for no reason other than that they *maybe* could be suspicious about her being the Red Queen. Apparently *that’s* OK but using human blood to preserve Grimm parts isn’t? Is Ruby just exempt from the whole “I won’t be having anyone who can avoid it commit a murder” thing? Weird.

Also if you really wanted to have Grimm producing usable raw materials (which really seems more appropriate for a Minecraft mod or something and doesn’t contribute all that much to the story as is) just *don’t* have them dissolve or have some material be left behind or whatever. This is already a fast and loose approach to canon so there’s no point in bending over backwards to produce an explanation that doesn’t even really work.

Alright, so the first few chapters are rough. I still remember it being good though

First chapter is pretty rough, but it's a great series.

This story has some serious problems, and is an absolute chore to read.

I suppose in the most abstract of senses the premise isn’t *bad*, but it and “betrayal fics” like it *are* incredibly overdone and more to the point you still have to *do* something with the premise other than just “the main character has teh sadz and is #foreveralone”. This ‘fic doesn’t really have that. The idea of Ruby having to live in the wilds and befriend Grimm I suppose could work (see below), as could there being what is essentially a murder mystery at Beacon with a bunch of people trying to find out how and why a student was killed. But this story cannot decide on actually *doing* either of these things, nor does it find any way to synthesize the ideas into a cohesive whole- rather, it is meandering and directionless.

In terms of its execution there are a lot of other issues as well:

1: The prose is overwrought and rambling. Fancier words are used when a simpler one would do, and *twenty* words are used when *five* would do. Some things (mostly pertaining to Ruby) are ridiculously overdescribed to fill in details absolutely nobody actually cares about, and other things are glossed over. To make matters worse as the ‘fic goes on characters will often rehash entire scenes that *the reader already saw*, taking up paragraphs upon paragraphs without providing anything new.

2: Mechanically, the writing is flawed. There’s a lot of sentence fragments, misattributed dialogue, words that don’t mean what you think they mean, and misspellings. Coupled with Point 1 above, this makes the story very difficult to read and comprehend at even the most basic level.

3: There is a bunch of pointless symbolism that doesn’t really accomplish anything. References, symbolic connections, and other such things are like literary sprinkles. When the reader finds one in the story, if it’s cleverly hidden, they say ‘oh, hey, that’s neat!’ and feel clever for having figured it out, *and then they move on and try to find something more substantial in the content of the work itself*. Tossing sprinkles constantly in our faces by the handful completely defeats the point, and to make matters worse the ‘fic *derails its own plot so that symbolism can happen*, sacrificing a *lot* in terms of pacing, structure, and overall readability for a very small payoff. And that’s not even counting the stuff that seems to exist for literally no purpose and connect to nothing, like a character whose name is “Cold Fire” spelled backwards but has nothing at all else to do with either cold or fire. Nobody *cares* that you have read Alice in Wonderland, and anybody who *does* care that much about Alice in Wonderland itself will be reading Alice in Wonderland fanfiction and not RWBY fanfiction.

4: There is a bunch of philosophical rambling about darkness and innocence and killing which also amounts to nothing whatsoever and simply pads out the story beyond any natural length.

5: Ruby herself is a massive Mary Sue. She is always right, has nearly every ability, and even when she loses a fight it turns around to benefit her in the end by making her edgier and more “badass”. The entire plot revolves around her, and all of the other characters define themselves in relation *to* her- either they are good people because they admire and support her, or they are bad people because they either resent her or are one-dimensional MRA cutouts who want to rape her (more on this below). Even the narration itself preferentially favors her, describing her gear and outfits in ludicrous detail when other characters are lucky to ever get a hair and eye color.

6: The ‘fic goes out of its way to use weirdly sexual imagery when describing Ruby and particularly her interactions with both rapey male villain characters and the grimm she ‘subjugates’. And it also describes her repeatedly as ‘child’-like or ‘doll’-like.

7: In keeping with the above, the ‘fic goes out of its way to be *edgy*, with a lot of rape and gore and death and INNER DARKNESSSSSSSSS and red-and-black bone costumes that all accomplishes… not a lot. There is very little pathos and very little sense of stakes.

I am disappointed yet satisfied, this is an odd feeling. This was great though.

Not gonna lie, as an older sibling reading this made me want to commit murder.