Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-24934890-20181008004211/@comment-25396609-20181015232926

Arkantos95 wrote: Doesn't change the fact that they retconned that to have Ruby too young to remember anything about her, so Ruby is now down to 0 songs for her that actually matter. You know I see people talking about that, but... I don't actually remember anything in the show to validate it. The only line I recall was "Ruby was really torn up, but... I think she was still too young to really get what was going on, y'know?"

Nothing about this line says Ruby does not remember her mother. It says she was too young to understand death, and that her mother wasn't coming back this time.

These are VASTLY different things.

On average, humans start to develop permanent memories at ~3-4 years old. In fact, literally the earliest memory I have was waking up in bed one morning and having NO FUCKING CLUE WHAT WAS GOING ON. I had those instinctive memories, I recognized things and knew my brother, parents, etc, but I had no specific memories.

Now, Yang made ONE later statement during Burning the Candle, during her explanation to Blake, "A toddler sleeping in the back of a wagon and a stupid girl too exhausted to even cry for help."

This is an interesting one. If Ruby was torn up about the death of her mother, she must have some sense of memory. She absolutely HAS to have been old enough to begin forming memories. For Ruby to qualify as a toddler, she would be at most 3 years old. Which would make Yang 5.

Now, speaking from experience, a five year old child is not capable of walking "for hours."

Their bodies just aren't developed enough, they lack the stamina for extended travel like that.

What is more likely, that a five your old walked an extended distance unprotected, or that she was older but does not accurately remember the situation because of the level of emotional stress and physical exhaustion she was experience?

We should also note that Yang may not have been speaking literally in calling Ruby a toddler, she may have been using it in a more general sense to refer to Ruby as being very young.

tl;dr: Calling it a retcon is a stretch, as we were never given specific details about when it happened to begin with.

Also, people these days label literally everything that doesn't mesh with their specific interpretation of events as a retcon.

And finally; even if it is a retcon, who the hell cares? Even with a bare minimum of specific memories, Ruby would still have known who her mother was. She would have been told stories; by Yang, by Tai, by Qrow. Doesn't matter who.

You can have an emotional attachment to a person or thing you do not clearly remember. The dialogue between Ruby and Summer presented in Red Like Roses II can easily be interpreted as an older Ruby reflecting on how she never really got a chance to be with her mother because Summer died when she was young, from the perspective of someone who only vaguely remembers her personally but has been told all about her by close family and friends.