Board Thread:Speculation House/@comment-12443850-20130808003319/@comment-10545520-20130811040141

I have kind of a feeling though, that the Grim may be much more complex (or symbolic) than we'd think. After discovering RWBY, I've developed an interest in fairy tales and have taken to reading the original, non-sanitized versions online--and let me tell you, some of them are rather...grim.

Seeing how the whole RWBY series was inspired by fairy tales, I have a feeling that there seems to be an almost deeper meaning to everything in the series. This is what I mean; the original fairy tales were rather bloody, and in some parts, downright disturbing (one of the crowning examples was with Red Riding Hood, which, in the original version, was jam-packed with sexual themes), then they were made, well, fairy-talish (as in, blah, blah, blah, everyone lives happily ever after). But now, as people are getting more used to dealing with darker themes, some writers have begun to (almost gleefully) start writing mind-numbingly dark stories...simply for the sake of writing mind-numbingly dark stories.

RWBY is almost like one gigantic fairy-tale. Originally, there was darkness (as represented in the orginal Grimm tales) but then due to the efforts of people, made light again. But now, in a culture of excess and decay (with people such as Crimson and Roman contributing to anarchy), the Grim have made a comeback (while I thought BenRG's idea of Crimson being a Grim Cultist pretty intriguing, personally, I don't think the Grim are the kind of being to ally with humans, and Crimson just didn't give off the cultist vibe. In my mind, while the Grim-human war to come is definitely going to be a big thing, I feel the series will be more focused on human vs human or human vs fauna conflict, with the omnipresent Grim invasion forming a forbidding background, even as civilization collapses under it own weight). It seems to me as if the Grim aren't even individual entitiies, but some kind of spirit tied to the state of human civilization, hence why it takes a "simple soul" to defeat (or maybe, if my theory about RWBY being about society correct, it takes an idealistic soul who truly believes in what is right, rather than what is easy or profitable, to pull civilization together to defeat the Grim).

Wow, now that I've written it down, I've just realized how contrived it sounds.

It simply may be, of course, that Monty is using the standard "Evil was here. Evil was defeated. Evil is returning. Now, you must stop it!" formula, as seen in Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and basically hundreds of other books (in no way does this diminish my opinions of it, though. Why abandon a formula that works?), without all that extra symbolic baggage.

Still, the only way we'll know is to grit our teeth and wait for Thursday!