Talk:Ozpin/@comment-209.93.52.190-20160926011342/@comment-209.93.52.190-20160926124514

It's true that I was probably trying to shoehorn Team RWBY into the Oz system and given Ruby is now part of Team RNJR (?) it makes less sense (and Ruby and Toto being Dorothy and Toto makes more sense) though, worryingly, it makes Jaune sacrificing himself for someone and being burned for it more likely :(

As for parallels, there are non new stories, it's all been done before and "everything is a remix" (check that out if you've time it's pretty good). The intelligence is putting together the stories in an overlapping way that their references don't get in the way of the new way you have recombined them (though said new way has almost certainly been done before, probably even in this format - we are the story animals, if it it's truely original it probably incomprehensible to anyone else (unless it is a new media / format / technology) ... the stories have all been done before in some order or other; that's not to say they were done well and dont deserve being done again or that they have been forgotten in the mean time and so seem original.

Having said that, because many of us seem to be trying to predict how things will go we can only go on the references and leads because if it were truely an original story then there would be no hope of us guessing, even if it's not original there is almost no chance of us guessing correctly but the speculation breaks down if we aren't allowed to try and follow the patterns... think of it as playing detective and following the clues; all the more since good writing (which this is undoubtedly is) tends to use foreshadowing (particularly foreshadowing that is only noticed after the fact: those "I should have realisedthis was going to happen" moments) and follows its own style and, in this case, has an internal consistency, all the more because this internal consistency is based on fairy tales (and the regular subversion of them - meaning characters match but story lines don't map properly) there is a lot of scope for following leads etc.

We are, in effect, trying to do the same as Ozpin - collect ideas and information and test them and try and work out what s going on in the present so that we can work out where the future is headed to know whether that is desirable or not - unlike him we are not able to do anything about it but I have been wondering whether, if the time storage capabilities of his cane are true and broad, he is actually able to do anything either - often those who can travel in time or know the future are forced (one way or another) to "repeat" it, in other words that a belief in destiny is irrelevant, it exists whether you like it or not and there is nothing you can do about it... though this is a very Ancient Greek way of looking at things - their heros were all about trying to do the best by everyone, and not swerving from dong things that these days would be considered fool hardy... this is very much how things played out in Cinder's favour in Vol. 3 - no one expected anyone to cheat in the tournament and those who stood against Cinder at the end did so in a rather predictable "accepting destiny and refusing to rise against it" way. I think that we will see things change in the coming Vol.s with Silver Eyes defying destiny - Golden Eyes Dactylos in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series is a philosopher and a definite defier of the Gods there (including Fate and Destiny) - other references to Silver Eyes are a small agile bird from Oz and New Zealand and a small dragon (called a Bolla) from Albania who eats a human once every twelve years and then sleeps - and, of course, Ruby reverses this idea by freezing the dragon with her own silver eyes... She is the defier of fate/destiny if anyone is (similar to most modern American heros - as opposed to the Ancient Greek ones I mentioned earlier).