oh my god a rwby thing with lore what is this sick filth
You no longer have a physical nose but you catch Gotthard's scent all the same. It's strange - human of course, but carrying a faint and familiar scent. Grimm but old, baked-in like carrion too aged to even reek right.
Huh. It looks like Glynda was...maybe not a Grimm but possibly possessed at one point in time? We know that's a thing and it's heavily implied that the hosts don't usually survive, either they degenerate into hungry monsters, just shadow-beasts in skin-suits or they get put down with the parasite inside them. Whatever it was it looks like it happened a long time ago, probably before she started teaching.
Oooooh, I think it was brought up before but the thorns are kinda Sleeping Beauty and the dress is kinda Fairy Godmother. Maybe she was both the Fairy Godmother and possessed by Malificent!Grimm at one point? Both of them were the same person. Idk.
Also lol the rest of the profs: fucking Faunus!Chieron and the no-shit Norns. Not sure who the blacksmith or the bear are but they probably fit in the same vein.
"We have quite a few faunus in this batch, don't we?" he says. "That's something. Russell and Yang are natural-born Vale citizens, right? Yang seems to have done fine for herself sofar, but poor Russell. To think of all that potential being wasted if we hadn't picked him up."
He trails off, frowning. "Although to speak of wasted potential..."
"Belladonna?" the mustachio'd man prompts him. The horse-eared young professor nods.
"Right, right. Well, short answer is Vale's a rotting corpse." Torchwick takes another sip, then spins his stool around to face you, gesturing with the sloshing half-full tumbler. "Long answer, we passed the golden age here a long time ago. Right after the Arcadian War, when the colonies were on the up-and-up and the economy was booming? Golden years my friend, everyone thought we were invincible. The rich got richer, the middle-class got upper-middle-er, and hell for a second there it looked like the trickle-down was actually gonna trickle down! But eventually gravy-trains run out of gravy, and if you were too stupid to make a stop or two for some backup fuel, you only got two options - get off or coast and hope. And kid, this city's running out of track."
Man it's no Battle of Fort Castle but I guess the Arcadian War is pretty important.
Also the picture it paints is pretty fucking dire. Arcadia is (was?) the Faunus Empire and it was physically close enough that at least Vale, probably Atlas, and possibly Vacuou and Mistral went to war with it. Arcadia lost, hard, and the Schnees got license to go all East India Company on its ass. They likely oversee a lot of the colonies in the region, manage resource extraction, and employ de facto slave labor (probably in the mining and refinement of Dust). It's interesting to note too that both Yang and Russel are Vale-born which implies that either the two regions had a fair amount of trade once-upon-a-time or that things in Arcadia have gotten so bad that over the course of multiple generations Faunus have fled it to neighboring nations, looking for work and homes. Becoming second class citizens in the countries that conquered them. Whiiiich would fit with the jab Blake threw.
Tacked onto that I think it's worth noting that Blake was
not born in Vale. And her parent's whereabouts are Super Unknown, Probably Bad.
...Man in that context it's kinda interesting how Ozpin has a Faunus professor on staff and mandates classes on Arcadian history/general studies. Like his approach really isn't level with "imperializing nation vs imperialized country".
[X] Weiss Schnee. The spitting image of the Snow Queen. Some sort of princess from a faraway land, her motives for coming here at all a mystery twice over. Lonely and yet violently opposed to comfort and company.
WHAT THE FUCK IS YOUR DEAAAAAAAAAAL
No seriously like, Blake is a question-mark and we'll probably figure her out later but Weiss is just this big floating mess of contradictions and more immediately pressing. The Snow Queen doesn't look like Belladonna after all and it's a
super odd coincidence that some immensely powerful Grimm would send us to the same school in the same year that someone who looks oddly like her is attending.