The Winter Challenge - Commentary - Ch. 7-8 (Patreon)

Welcome back to more commentary for The Winter Challenge, aka that story where everyone is oblivious about their feelings!

As the story progresses, I think it becomes more obvious that Weiss is just as oblivious as she is observant.  In her defense, she’s so distracted by the prospect of helping Blake and Yang get together that she doesn’t have time to figure out what her feelings for Ruby mean.  She’s a busy person!

But we’ve just crossed the halfway mark of this story, so everything should come to a head eventually.  Or they’ll stay oblivious forever - who knows.

As a recap, we start Chapter 7 with Team RWBY returning from their challenge of ‘how many people can Yang flirt with in one day, plus Coco.’  We learn that they managed to get five keys, an arbitrary number I picked because, again, I have no idea how many teams are actually at Beacon.  From the size of the school and the number of people walking around on move-in day, it seems like it should be a lot.

Then again...they only had enough incoming freshmen to form three teams.  Then again, they had that meeting with Professor Ozpin and that entire room was filled with huntsmen!  

I wonder how popular that career choice is.  What percent of Remnant decides that killing angry monsters is their true calling?  5%?  Less than that?  Probably less, I think…

Ok, before I get into all those questions, let’s move on to the questions Weiss should ask herself.  Like why can’t she stop thinking about kissing Ruby’s cheek?  And why is it so important that whatever gift she gets Ruby is ‘better’ than the book on Nevermores that Yang gave her?

The book on Nevermores, by the way, is a reference to the same book Ruby had in What Defines Us.  I’m fairly certain that she had a book on Nevermores that Yang gave her in that story, which she studied religiously while trying to get back on her feet.

It’s coming back to me a little more now...she studied the books while she was still too weak to do much training.  So when training exhausted her, she exhausted her brain, then trained some more, then studied some more, etc., etc.  That feels right to me, but I don’t trust my brain sometimes.  The stories are beginning to meld into each other a little bit by this point.

Ok, so Weiss is competing with Yang’s gift from WDU.  Don’t you love how she thinks to herself: 

Thinking of gifts for Ruby wasn’t difficult.  The hard part was deciding which one was meaningful enough to give on Christmas day.  She deserved something extraordinary - because she was extraordinary - and Weiss wanted to be the one to give it to her. 

Hmm...where have we heard this before?  How about back in Chapter 4:

“Oh, well, you know, it’s easy to come up with gift ideas for Blake.  Plus, she deserves them, you know?”

Weiss basically just ripped off Yang’s entire line here and used it for Ruby instead.

Side note on Weiss’ idea to give Ruby a panda stuffed animal - I used pandas because they’re my second favorite animals!  Well, for a really long time they were my favorite animals - they’re gentle, but bears!  I say second favorite now because I used to volunteer at a zoo and helped with the giraffes, now giraffes are my favorite.  (They’re gentle, but massive???)

I think I used pandas here because pandas seemed more Ruby’s style.  I could imagine her acting like a little baby panda, couldn’t you?  This is totally Ruby: 

(Also, I’ve learned how to insert gifs into these posts, if you haven’t noticed!)

Ok, even if you don’t think Ruby is like a baby panda, I got to share some cuteness with you.  Back to our characters being cute.

Or at least, back to our characters being ironic, which is exactly how I felt about Weiss saying that she should refer to Blake’s bed as “Blake and Yang’s bed” because of how much time they both spend there.  In the background, Ruby is almost always on Weiss’ bed.  Whenever they get back from anywhere, Ruby jumps onto Weiss’ bed instead of climbing up to her own.

Let’s cut the sisters some slack though.  They have the top bunks!  It must be exhausting to jump up and down all day long whenever they want to sit down.  In that case, it’s reasonable to expect them to use their partner’s beds instead...for sitting.  And napping.  And sleeping, in general.  Good thing Weiss and Blake don’t mind sharing, right?

That’s a little debatable...but they at least don’t mind sharing with their partners!  Which brings me back to one of Weiss’ pearls of wisdom from Chapter 4, which she conveniently forgets about now.

One of the easiest ways for hidden feelings of love to surface?  A sudden spike of jealousy.  The emotion was a clear indicator of deeper feelings, and its appearance could spark a conversation.  At the very least, it should serve as a wake-up call that the ‘just friends’ line was a lie.

She thinks this right before paying Neptune to flirt with Yang (nearly getting him killed in the process).  Flash forward a few days, and she’s spending her afternoon musing about how pretty Ruby has become, and how she’ll have to beat the boys away with a stick soon enough.  (In particular, I love her idea that she and Yang can work together - “forming a vicious and capable tag team that every boy at Beacon should fear.”)

But that’s not jealousy, right?  That’s just...protectiveness!  And looking out for her partner.  Even as she says that she probably has higher standards for Ruby than for herself.  (I mean...she did go after Neptune in canon so…)

And then, when she jumps to the completely wrong conclusion about what Ruby and Jaune are doing, that’s not jealousy!  That’s just...annoyance.

Poor girl...just let her be gay already!

I guess that’s my fault, but let’s not dwell on that.  Instead, let’s focus on how incredibly mature Ruby is.  While Weiss is prepared to never speak about Coco’s dare again (and spend hours upon hours dwelling on it instead), it’s Ruby who has the courage to bring up the topic.

Just thinking about having that conversation makes me feel embarrassed.  Then there’s poor Weiss worrying that she can’t even kiss someone’s cheek correctly.  I do wonder how someone could mess up a kiss on the cheek though...

Actually no, let’s not think about that.

For as awkward and as embarrassed as Ruby is, she manages to get out what she wants to say - mainly, that she wouldn’t mind if Weiss kissed her cheek again.  If Weiss ever wanted to.  Or felt like it.  Or happened to stumble and needed to catch herself...by kissing Ruby’s cheek.

And Weiss - Miss That’s-Totally-Not-Just-A-Friend-Thing - immediately agrees that it wouldn’t be weird or anything for them to start kissing each other’s cheeks.  Because why would that be weird?  Friends do that all the time!  

Like Ruby and Jaune - they’re friends.

Can you imagine what Weiss would do if she say Ruby kiss Jaune on the cheek?  She might explode.  Then again, Ruby seems to know just how to make Weiss feel special or secure.  And that’s kind of what Weiss needs, right?  She can be a little insecure, especially in her relationships, so she searches out confirmation for what she feels.  Fortunately, I think Ruby’s just the person to keep reassuring her.

I think Ruby’s a good influence on Weiss, in general.  We’ve seen that throughout the story, but I think we can also see it at the beginning of Chapter 8 when she mentions that she wants to help the lunch ladies too.  Can you imagine her wanting to do that at the beginning of Beacon?  I can’t.  I can imagine her making some sort of comment about how that job is beneath her though.

Now, however, she wants to help.  She’s still stuck in a phase where she’s uncertain if the lunch ladies would even accept her, especially with her nonexistent cooking skills.  Don’t worry though - later on in the year, she’ll definitely start helping.  And she’ll learn that she can contribute in ways she never thought of before.

Growth!  

In Chapter 8, I also left a hint as to how Weiss picked up on this growing crush between Blake and Yang to begin with - 

They talked about books together, or commiserated over their partners (although Blake had done a lot more gushing over her partner recently…).

Can you imagine Weiss’ confusion when Blake becomes more complimentary about Yang?  It was probably small at first, but suddenly she’s complimenting Yang’s fighting abilities and her hair and how nice she looks and how she has a great smile?  Weiss’ crush radar picked right up on that.

(Also, did you notice at the end of the chapter when Blake also makes the claim that she’s observant?  How much do you want to bet that she’s also rolling her eyes at how obvious Ruby and Weiss are being?)

Ok, on the topic of Blake opening letters…

So, basically, I needed a reason why Yang would receive an envelope and not open it right away.  What better reason than Blake?  As a result, I just made Blake look a little bit like a weirdo who loves to open letters, but hear me out!  I thought there was a perfectly good, and hopelessly romantic, explanation for it.

She likes to imagine they’re love letters!  Right?  Letters are romantic.  Or, maybe while she was with Adam in the White Fang, she imagined receiving letters from someone else.  A long lost friend or relative who wrote to her and assured her that things weren’t as bad as they seemed.  Or, maybe they urged her to leave and create a better life for herself. 

Well, that just got depressing.  But I could totally see Blake being someone to come up with imaginary scenarios like that because of her situation and love for reading.  Reading is fun because it can be an escape from the real world, right?  

Later on, I could see Yang writing Blake love letters all the time, even when they live together!  She’ll actually drop them off at the post office to be mailed too.  And then, Blake can open up and read these letters that are actually real, because it’s actually her life, and she loves it. 

See?  That got better!  Very sweet at the end.

Now back to their scavenger hunt, which I thought sounded like a fun idea.  Ok, Miko tangent time.  The only scavenger hunt I’ve ever done was when I was in sixth grade.  We went to this wilderness park (it was probably a campground or something) and were supposed to use compasses to find items hidden in this little patch of forest.  

Now, when we practiced using a compass at school before we left, I was an all-star.  But I couldn’t find anything in that forest.  I was so disappointed...here I thought I’d be super awesome at it, and I found nothing!  Maybe it was the people placing the items that couldn’t use a compass.  Either way, I should have just run around using my eyes like everyone else in my class.  Screw the compasses!

Anyway...speaking of competitiveness, Weiss is fairly competitive herself, isn’t she?  Even amongst her own team.  I love how as soon as Yang finds a key, she’s like “I must find more.”  I also like that, regardless of how much she wants to win, she’s rational enough to realize that winning isn’t worth putting their lives in danger.

And that brings me to Nora...who dragged Ren into the bowels of the forest looking for keys.  Now I wonder how Professor Goodwitch distributed the keys...she probably had thousands that she just flung into the forest hoping they landed somewhere remotely hidden.  Or she made the people in detention help her with it.  That wouldn’t be so bad for detention, right?

Ok, so Team RWBY’s out in the forest searching for keys - that sounds like the perfect time for Yang and Blake’s first kiss, right?  They were so close, too…

I bet it started out super innocent.  They’re having a good time walking through the woods while casually looking for keys.  And then...Blake keeps spotting them.  Of course she can - they’re bright and shiny!  And the more of them she finds, the more Yang compliments her.  

You can see where this is going, right?  Blake finds a key, Yang compliments her.  Blake finds another key, Yang compliments her more.  As we know from the end, Blake found nineteen keys.  So...can you imagine what Yang’s compliments had grown to by then?

From there, it isn’t much of a leap for them to bring up some other feelings.  And from there, it isn’t much further for Yang to sense The Moment.  And she goes for it, only for Ruby to burst in! That’s little sisters for you, right?

So at the end of this chapter, I totally forgot to bring SSSN and CRDL back from their trek through the woods.  It was like they just vanished into thin air  So at the last minute, I added the little line that they got back first and already left.  They had a three-hour window to work with, but there was no rule about how long they had to stay out there.  Maybe they got bored in two hours and went home early.

Sometimes, it’s hard to remember all of the pieces and where they are.  That’s why editing is important!  But that part even got through editing, so that’s why proofreading is important!

Anyway, we end this chapter with a bit of an impending issue on our hands, as Blake is now being weird around Yang since Weiss witnessed their almost first kiss.  That’s probably as much of a cliffhanger as we’ll get in this story...

Actually, that’s a lie - there’s a better one coming up, but that’s all I can say.  Stay tuned for more Weiss hijinks soon!

Until next time,

Miko