The titles appear to be juxtaposing Return of the Gears Motif with Eye of Sauron: The Grimmening in order to either contrast them or draw parallels. Or both.
Two of Atlas' finest guard the door to Team RWBY's dorm room as, within, Ironwood (understandably, but still saddeningly) doesn't believe any protests of innocence. The evidence is clear; and even if we know it isn't, and even if Ironwood somehow knew it wasn't, the public never would. Yang is disqualified.
Ironwood leaves. At least Yang has Team RWB to back her up. Or rather, Team RW. Blake is (also understandably) having flashbacks to Adam's spiral into being the Adam we know and loathe. Fortunately she pushes past it and takes Yang's word.
Team JNPR are also standing with Yang. During this, we are exposited at that Mercury's cover story is rushing back home to family, conveniently putting him out of reach for clarification.
Ruby encourages Pyrrha to "win one for Beacon". Ruby isn't exactly to know that Pyrrha also has a lot on her mind.
Nora you're not helping.
Nora implies that the remaining finals matches will be split across multiple days. Decent chance that was the plan all along, which makes even more of a mockery of the theory of giving the competitors no prep time - the remaining six have had a day to know they won't be facing Yang or Mercury; and Yang (if she wasn't framed) or Mercury (if he'd won) would have had three days to make plans to fight whoever won this next match, because the only way that fight wouldn't happen is if they drew opposite semi-finals and one or both of them lost. Of course, even using four arenas simultaneously would give prep time while the drawn finalists were moved there. And the winners would still have some time to plan hypothetical semi-finals (only three possibilities), and those winners would know they would face each other in the grand final. Because this is on global live television:
good luck keeping results under embargo. And the sooner you schedule successive rounds to deny prep time, well.
It is now time for
michaelb958's Tangentially Related Storytime.
A tennis match is divided into sets, which are subdivided into games, and further into points. Scoring of points in a game is weird (they count 15, 30, 40, basically-50 instead of 1, 2, etc. like everything else ever), but it boils down to you have to score four points and lead by two points to win the game. Similarly, to win a set you have to win six games and
mostly you have to lead by two games. (There is no lead requirement for sets in the match; it's just best of three, or five.) The exception is if the set score reaches six games each, a "tiebreak game" is played, where points are tracked by normal numbers, the goal is a bit higher, and the winner wins the set despite leading only by one game.
As of 2022, the four major tournaments and the Olympics have all agreed on tiebreak games to 10 points (and leading by two). The longest known tiebreak game, in case you're wondering, was in 2013 and ended up with a scoreline of 36-34. There was a fair while that tiebreak games weren't played in the final set at many tournaments - there are reasons they changed, and here is the biggest one.
On 22 June 2010, John Isner (USA) and Nicholas Mahut (France) met for their first-round match at Wimbledon, best of five sets. They each won one of the first two sets. They each won one of the second two sets, by tiebreak game. The fifth set was delayed to the next day because it got dark. The next day's play alone would have set the record for the longest tennis match in history: by the time it got dark again, seven hours later, the fifth set was tied at 59 games each, which was so unbelievable that the electronic scoreboard had crashed at 47 each and some IBM programmer had to pull a late night to hotfix it.
On the third day (absolutely unheard of), there was a merciful end after slightly more than an hour as Isner pulled two games ahead to win the set 70-68, and with it the match. (Yet another reason this was a good thing was that IBM had advised that the hotfix wouldn't hold if anybody reached 73.) Isner had to play his second-round match the next day, against Theimo de Bakker (Netherlands), who had won his fifth set 16-14 and then had a day off. Isner was bundled out in the minimum three sets in the shortest singles match of the tournament to that point, and went straight home (withdrawing from doubles matches he was scheduled to play) to do literally anything except tennis. Mahut had to start a doubles match
that very evening and he and his partner lost the first set before darkness fell; scheduling conflicts then gave him a much-needed day off, but they proceeded to win only the third set.
The point here is that athletes need rest between matches. Given that you also can't hope to embargo results from folks in attendance, or keep a tournament draw secret from those who will be split up for it (unless they'll play simultaneously, meaning you need multiple playing areas [which Amity Colosseum doesn't have], and unless they're co-located you'll still need to be careful about not letting them see each other on the way), the Vytal Festival Tournament's theory of not giving finals competitors time to prepare for each other is not even a theory, merely an unsupported hypothesis. Yes I do have opinions about the tournament structure. Clearly it must be hardcoded in a peace treaty, otherwise it would have been changed for the better by now.
Anyway, Nora, having conjured a comically heavy weightlifter's bar to make her point, proceeds to demonstrate the importance of knowing your weightlifting limits.
Ren is also unwittingly not helping. {{So this is where the apron originated. Thread, should I buy one? Closely followed by the memetic green smoothie. Thread, I will not buy those.}}
In which Nora, for once, makes a joke and then has to face the reality that it wasn't a joke.
Is this what Jaune has had to deal with this entire year? Sympathy increasing.
Qrow, I wasn't sure it was possible to be less helping than Ren, but you just got there. I hope this is some kind of bluff to get Yang angry enough to rule out her lying. I'm not sure that's a wise plan, but it would be a slightly respectable plan. The alternative is you actually think that, which would not be respectable.
Oh no, it's worse: Yang skips anger and goes directly to doubting her own sanity.
...because she saw Raven on the train last Volume and thinks she (Raven) is her (Yang's) vanished mother. If she's connected enough dots between there, Qrow's photo she saw a few Chapters ago, and the photo she's carried with her for ages, it might even be plausible.
Yang's logic is that Raven's sword on the train matches Raven's sword in Qrow's picture.
Qrow confirms it!?!
Raven apparently passes messages to Qrow from time to time ("whenever it suits her"), and last time one of those messages was for Yang.
"Why didn't you tell me sooner?!"
"I was trying to wait for the right time, and this sure ain't it. But I guess you deserve to know."
An exchange that could just as much apply to the entire thing. Anyway, the message for Yang is that 'she saved you once, but you shouldn't expect that kindness again'. Edgelord gonna edgelord, I guess.
Qrow encourages Yang to "move on" from being framed on global live television. When Yang understandably wonders to what to move on, Qrow says he reckons he can help Yang track down Raven in the future.
Pyrrha meditates outside the dining hall. Why there? We may never know. A dead leaf blows down to her feet, reminding her of the extra stakes piled upon her. Fortunately, Jaune has brought what I'm told the Americans call cotton candy. (In Australia, we call it "fairy floss".)
Nora and Ren wander around the corner and see this, whereupon Nora drags Ren straight back. Is she trying to save Ren from the wrath of a near-victim of the green smoothie? Is she just giving the dorks some space to
do something? Or is it the result of Nora-logic, inscrutable to you or I?
Jaune confides to Pyrrha that she was the first person to believe in him - even his parents were more focused on planning for when he washed out of Beacon. (Understandably so. "Understandably so" seems to be the theme of this episode.) Pyrrha has a response, but forgets it and drops her pink fluffy sugar when she realises Jaune is holding her hand.
Are the dorks doing something?
The dorks are snuggling. It's adorable.
Another leaf blows in, unfortunately reminding Pyrrha that she has concerns that aren't 'when is Jaune leaving'. "Do you believe in destiny?" she asks, leading in to waxing philosophic about destiny in order to lead in to asking his advice. It doesn't work - despite Jaune's best efforts at working out what she's going on about, she's in too much turmoil (or just too many implied NDAs) to make a coherent point.
Eventually, coherence emerges, perhaps by metaphor. Pyrrha tells him she's certain her destiny is to save the world by becoming a Hunter, but no longer certain that she can do it. Jaune, being Jaune, presents a straightforward answer: since when did the Pyrrha he knew back down from that kind of challenge? From that kind of destiny?
Pyrrha starts crying. Jaune wonders why, mistakenly tries to touch her again, and is Semblanced into the wall for his sins. That poor wall, Goodwitch is going to have to repair it again. Pyrrha realises what she's done, snaps straight back to horror, and flees; Jaune is too dazed and confused to stop her. My poor heart.
At the landing pad, Ruby meets Velvet, who is "working on her photography". The photographs centre on departing exchange students' weapons. Velvet expresses her sympathy for Yang, noting that most of the public haven't met a battlefield and shouldn't be passing judgement on battle, giving the example of Coco's "stress-induced hallucination" during her doubles match. Then she snaps a cheeky photo of Ruby, or possibly Crescent Rose.
Later, Ruby settles in for the next quarter-final, and is taken aback to see (all the way across the arena) Emerald also doing so. For some reason she (Ruby) decides the best response to this is to wander into the stadium's service areas. There, who should she meet but Mercury, looking suspiciously able-bodied. Mercury is unruffled.
As the two of them have a staring contest, it is announced that the next match (as selected by Cinder, not that Ruby knows that) will be Penny v Pyrrha. Ruby thinks about it, and reaches a conclusion she really doesn't like. "Polarity versus metal?" muses Mercury, "that could be bad." And Emerald's there to stir the pot. Yeah, I'm getting a bad feeling too.
Ruby reaches for Crescent Rose, doesn't find it (it isn't there; clearly Velvet can't have photographed it), and so is forced to do nothing against a doubtless-armed (legged??) Mercury. Pyrrha, in the arena, looks like she'd rather be anywhere else.
Thanks credits concept art, now I finally know what an "ahoge" is and I'm not gonna lie, it's much less hentai than I thought. Also Velvet's camera gets so much design attention you'd think it was her weapon; I guess flash photography can sort of be categorised as 'glows funny colours'?
(Now that I have a pretext to officially look, credits confirm that Qrow
Branwen shares a family name with Raven [Branwen].)
Next time: Prophecy, fulfilled.
