Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-15108745-20130811001851/@comment-130.18.106.51-20131029183440

There's not enough info in Ruby's trailer to speculate as to its position in the timeline. The only clue we have is Summer's tombstone - and we don't know with any degree of certainty who Summer even is!

Weiss's trailer almost certainly takes place before the series, for the aforementioned reasons. However, I don't think her fight with the mech was an "accident." The signs are all there: her uptight, rigid attitude, her mindless drive to outperform, her strange mix of arrogant pride and crushing insecurity: This girl has been pushed, and pushed hard. There's no telling who it was (the most traditional story would suggest that it was an overzealous father), but someone in her past was never content with any degree of excellence at which Weiss might perform; they drove her harder and harder toward an unreachable level perfection. It seems likely that the fight with the mech was either practice or a test - one she was subjected to despite the very real possibility of her death.

Blake's involvement with the White Fang (assuming, as seems very likely, that her terrorist activities with Adam are White Fang-sanctioned) could have happened before or after her time at Beacon, but I tend to believe the prior. In either case, however, I highly doubt that her time with the White Fang was a lie. Notice how dark Blake's tone gets when a question of Faunus abuse arises. In the cafeteria, when Carden is bullying Velvet, Pyrrha is outraged by the specific act. Blake, on the other hand, comments on Faunus discrimination as a whole - and from the vitriol in her voice, she's far from nonpartisan in the issue. Now, these feelings may be the seeds of a future life of terrorism, but I think that there is a decent amount of evidence to the contrary. When we first meet Blake, she acts disillusioned and cynical, calling Ruby's fairy-tale ideals naïve. This is not the attitude of a budding radical firebrand. She speaks with the same resigned tone regarding Carden and Velvet - not enraged, but bitter. It seems as though she feels very strongly about Faunus Rights, but lacks the unbending conviction of the terrorist. I submit the possibility that she joined the "once-peacful organization" in its earlier days, hoping to change the world. However, in time, Adam's zeal for retribution eventually overcame his hope for a brighter future, and Blake, ever the faithful student, followed him willingly into the darkness. Over time her idealistic world of black and white was stained red with blood, and as the White Fang grew more and more violent, Blake became more and more callous and cynical in response. Eventually, desperate to escape the band of murderers that the White Fang had become, she siezed her opportunity to abandon her former teacher on the train. Then, possibly yearning for the clear-cut lines of good and evil she'd felt in her youth, she sought out a fight that could not possibly be wrong: the struggle of the Huntsmen and Huntresses against the creatures of Grim(m?).

Yang's trailer almost certainly takes place before episode 1, but for a less obvious reason: in the trailer, we see Torchwick engaged in some kind of business with Junior. Given that, in the very next video to come out, Torchwick is accompanied by a party of Junior's thugs, who were apparently hired for this job and this job only ("You were worth every cent"), it can be reasonably assumed we know what that business was. The real question is, what is Ruby doing there? And why is she surprised to see Yang? From Ruby's reaction, it's as though she didn't even think that Yang was in Vale. And why did she suddenly drop her search for the Transient Princess? She seems ready to kill to find her in the trailer, yet in the rest of the series, she never gives even the slightest indication that she is working on something behind the scenes. Ah, well. Questions for another day.