The Tale of a Cat Most Curious
and Remnant Timeline.
Take everything listed here for a grain of salt:
A Lighter Shade Of Black: The
Curious Cat is portrayed by the author as the least despicable and most sympathetic main character from
RWBY Volume 9, short of Little, and they're in opposition to RWBY/J and Neopolitan in this "vent fic." Despite the Cat's bitter feelings toward humans and ruthlessness in pursuing their goals, they have a much lower body count than Neo or RWBY/J do after the Fall of Atlas. The Cat's tragic backstory and lack of agency over their madness and desperation are pointed out and played for pathos, as is the fact they aren't actively threatening the Ever After or Remnant at large. Neopolitan pointedly has more moral agency over her evil actions and a much less compelling excuse than the Cat. Yet, she's more needlessly vicious and callous than them when endangering Atlas-Mantle and the Ever After and when torturing Ruby. RWBY/J are characterized as delusional, hypocritical, self-absorbed, and petty knights templar who accelerated James Ironwood's sanity slippage at the worst possible time for Atlas-Mantle, creating an even worse situation at the end of the Atlas arc than if they'd done nothing, have caused far more harm than they've prevented in the war against Salem on Remnant, and are liable to keep doing the same things to the rest of Remnant if they ever make it back out of the Ever After because most of them are more or less incapable of acknowledging that they were ever in the wrong and internalizing anything from their mistakes.
Anti-Villain: Downplayed by the Curious Cat. They're an embittered, ruthless desperate, self-serving entity willing to turn to psychological manipulation and murder if it helps them, and they despise humans due to their bad experiences involving Alyx, Lewis, and Jaune Arc. However, many of the Cat's unintentionally sympathetic traits and redeeming qualities from their canon portrayal are highlighted or confirmed in this fic. The Cat has tragic and traumatic reasons which they have almost no agency over for turning into what they are now, they have some internal regrets over murdering Alyx (an act they committed in a blind rage which afterward traumatized them), and they don't seriously harm or kill non-Remnantians if it doesn't get them closer to their goals. While the Cat is sadistic towards Remnantians due to the Remnantian-shaped chip on their shoulder, the Cat holds no ill will towards the other Afterans and won't hurt or endanger any of them very lightly. The Cat isn't disrupting either Remnant or the Ever After at large — in fact, the Cat is aware that their causing the end of Team RWBY in pursuit of their host might incidentally
save Remnant's inhabitants from even more Fall of Atlas-esque catastrophes.
Knight Templar: RWBY/J see themselves as heroes doing what's right and trying to save the world, but this portrayal takes their most criticized and unintentionally unsympathetic traits and actions from the show, and it runs with them. In truth, RWBY/J are incredibly destructive, self-absorbed, delusional, hypocritical, and petty manchildren who have created far more problems than they've solved in the war against Salem, are callous to others and even each other at times, and most of them avoid acknowledging, much less internalizing, their mistakes like the plague. RWBY/J functions as the antagonist to the Curious Cat's protagonist.
Villain Protagonist: The Curious Cat, the final main antagonist of
RWBY Volume 9, is the protagonist. They never redeem themself, but they're depicted as A Lighter Shade of Black compared to Neopolitan and RWBY/J.
Obfuscating Stupidity: The Curious Cat isn't as distractible as they appear to be. At the Garden, they deliberately feign getting distracted by a flower when they're supposed to be gathering ingredients for the Growgurt Parfait, so that Ruby's teammates, seeing this, will accompany the Cat and aim to keep them on track instead of staying with Ruby, making Ruby feel even more neglected by her teammates.
Karmic Death:
- Half of Team RWBY, namely Blake and Yang, are killed by the Curious Cat with an enraged and disillusioned Ruby's help, one after the other, which is treated as karma for the two of them callously ignoring and having no sympathy for Ruby's psychological breakdown, caring for nothing and no-one but their feelings first to a very petty degree, having no remorse for their roles in everything going to hell and thousands of people getting hurt during the events of Volumes 7-8, and rejecting every chance they and their teammates have had to take responsibility and face up to their colossal screw-ups.
- It's also implied that Neo might have met a karmic end herself; via being eaten by the original Jabberwalker, who she attacked practically unprovoked and enslaved upon her arrival in the Ever After, and whose powers she afterwards used via her Semblance to attack and murder the other Afterans and deny them ascension.
Took a Level in Dumbass:
- It's noted that Yang Xiao-Long used to be a kind, thoughtful, and emotionally intelligent young woman during Team RWBY's time at Beacon Academy, but in the years in between then and the team's fall into the Ever After, she's become an unaware, self-absorbed and negligent meathead who only commits to paying real attention to her feelings for Blake.
Adaptational Sympathy:
- The Curious Cat is regarded with a lot more sympathy than in the show, on account of the facts they (a) have no moral agency over their insatiable curiosity and inability to mend their own heart or ascend, which drove their insanity and reprehensible actions; (b) they aren't actively threatening a large amount of people, and (c) they've managed to keep one of the lowest kill-counts of anyone in RWBY despite technically being one of the very oldest characters in the setting, all of which is more than can be said for the characters that Volume 9 expected the viewer to root over the Cat for. The Cat's backstory is fleshed out and makes it even clearer that they're a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds who was tragically screwed from creation and spent thousands of years suffering before Alyx's betrayal drove them to their breaking point. It's also shown that while the Cat is sadistic to humans, they still have some compassion for their fellow Afterans like the Herbalist, and they take no pleasure in getting the Hawker eaten by Neo's Jabberwalkers. Instead of judging the Cat as somehow more evil than Team RWBY and Neo, the fic actually sides with the Cat over Team RWBY, Jaune, and Neo as the lesser evil out of them all.
- Conversely, Neo gets the inversion of this trope, as the author considers Neo at the end of Volume 9 to be a Karma Houdini who was easily forgiven and remained much less deserving of it than the Cat. Whereas Volume 9 regarded Neo with more sympathy than the Cat over her feelings towards Roman and desire to avenge him; this fic points out that she was already a murder-happy sadist with a body count long before Torchwick's death motivated her to avenge him, her quest for vengeance is nothing more than Avenging the Villain with a massive case of Moral Myopia, plus she has hurt and killed far more people human, Faunus and Afteran than the Curious Cat ever has (especially after she helped Salem's organization during the downfall of Atlas), all of which should make Neo considerably worse than the Cat. Even the Cat, who is normally designed to emote compassion as their first instinct for other broken hearts, is disgusted by Neo and the range of her crimes.
Humans Are The Real Monsters: The Afteran Curious Cat views all humans as irreparably-dysfunctional assholes, and what few humans (and Faunus) show up in the Ever After alive sadly don't do much to prove them wrong. Alyx was a cruel and selfish child who ruined multiple Afterans' lives and hearts including the Cat's, outright causing the latter's final push into darkness during her Heel–Face Door-Slam, and Lewis and Jaune Arc did nothing effective to mitigate or reverse the damage her actions caused. Neopolitan is a remorseless, morally myopic murderer and sadist who has significantly more moral agency over her evil than the Cat does, seeks nothing better than to avenge her personal grief over the death of a similarly unrepentant and evil man, and has overall hurt far more people than the Cat. Team RWBY are depicted in this accusation fic as delusional, self-centered, and hypocritical heroic wannabes whom have made no real progress to defeating Salem that wasn't undone later, but have managed to massively and pointlessly exacerbate the collateral and shoot all of civilization's long-term chances in the foot with their actions in Atlas-Mantle. Plus Jaune, on top of being about as guilty as Team RWBY and failing to mitigate Alyx's actions, held the Paper Pleasers hostage for many years out of his
secretly selfish desperation to succeed at something while he was traumatized, and before that, he failed to stop either Alyx's destructive antics or her causing the Cat's final push into insanity.
The World Is Just Awesome: The Curious Cat used to love going to the Ever After acres' highest vantage points to drink in the view of the various acres, especially the giant toadstool lookout, although it's hinted that the views have largely become a novelty to them after the passage of eons confined to the Ever After.
Used To Be A Sweet Kid:
- As per canon, the Curious Cat. They used to be a very kind and compassionate Afteran who was content in their role helping other Afterans and could even be protective. But eons of having their heart and psychological well-being worn down — by a combination of piling up heartaches after heartaches, and their own design flaws of being constantly hungry for new knowledge and answers past the point where they all but ran out of new answers in the Ever After's confines, and lacking the ability to ascend for repair — culminating in the overwhelming psychological trauma of permakilling Alyx in a moment of blind rage and being unable to ascend afterward, have taken their toll on the Cat. Making them very bitter, angry, cynical, and self-serving, with a major chip on their shoulder against humans.
- Ruby bemoans how bright, kind, nurturing, and emotionally intelligent she remembers Yang Xiao-Long used to be before the Fall of Beacon, versus how Yang has since turned into a much more self-absorbed, unkind, and thoughtless person who cares little for Ruby or anyone else outside of herself and Blake.
Blue And Orange Morality: The Ever After's Tree, Blacksmith, and weather phenomena like the Punderstorms all function on blue-and-orange morality when it comes to addressing and "fixing" an Afteran or Remnantian's psychological hurdles. The Ever After's express intention is making sure whatever being it "helps" ultimately feels content with whatever they consider their purpose going forward, even if what they do in that purpose hurts or otherwise negatively affects others – such as the Red King becoming the much more vicious and hostile Red Prince to avoid experiencing a second loss of purpose, or Blake and Yang embracing their romantic feelings; feelings which make Blake and Yang feel happy, but have brought out far more bad than good traits in both of them, including making them more callous and destructive to everyone else. The accusation fic uses this to explain why The Ever After during Volume 9 panders to the canon's unintentional protagonist-centered morality and supports decisions and actions which the author saw as RWBY/J unintentionally doubling down on their mistakes and putting their egos ahead of the people they claim to protect.
Tragic Bigot: The Curious Cat was already heavily implied to be one in canon, but this fic confirms it outright. They think dimly of all humans as broken, weak and deranged creatures because of Alyx's craven actions throughout the time the Cat was with her: wrecking other Afterans through cruel and selfish whims, betraying her own allies, and lastly her carelessly breaking her promise to free the Cat from the Ever After, which completed the Cat's start of darkness when they snapped and murdered her in rage. The fact that Alyx waited until she and the Cat were
seconds away from crossing through the door to Remnant before she completely dashed the Cat's desperate hopes of escaping the Ever After and finally getting answers after their centuries without satisfaction did not help. For bonus points, this fic shows that the Cat is a lot more sadistic towards humans and other people from Remnant than they are to other Afterans in the present.
Can't Take Criticism: As part of the deconstruction of post-Beacon RWBY/J's characterization, Yang Xiao-Long is pathologically all but incapable of hearing any criticism of hers or her team's actions, however justified, without automatically interpreting it as an attack on her person and viewing the one giving the criticism with hostility. Ruby Rose has a less petty and aggressive case, as she psychologically breaks down in the face of criticism over her mistakes on Remnant and the
overwhelming weight of the harm she and her so-called friends' idiocy has caused.
At Least I Admit It: The Curious Cat presents themself this way. They're ruthless, self-serving, and they're willing to deceive, manipulate and even kill (by proxy or directly) to get themself closer to their goals, but they at least are self-aware and don't deny it: unlike RWBY/J, whom consider themselves the capital-H heroes despite having ultimately committed the same crimes of deceit, manipulation and mass murder by proxy that they decry others for, with far more disastrous fallout than anything the Cat has ever caused, because RWBY/J refused to be "the good guys" on anyone's terms but their own.
Heroic Wannabe: RWBY/J. The fic takes their unintentionally unsympathetic traits and actions from canon, and it runs with them to show RWBY/J as they really come across in the canon series' later volumes. RWBY/J persistently want to be heroes making the world better, but they suffer from
hero complexes
and other narcissistic tendencies, including rampant moral hypocrisy, selfishness, black-and-white insanity, and an inability to properly own up to their mistakes, with a helping of consistent incompetence. They frequently put their own wants and needs before those of the very people they claim to be protecting, which goes against one of the core tenets of heroism: self-sacrifice. Across the canon course of event, RWBY/J haven't made any significant progress of their own towards combating the forces of evil, and they've in fact caused much more damage than they've fixed.
Revenge Fic: Written after the airing of Volume 9 as a "vent fic" by an author who despises what the main "heroes" of
RWBY have become in the later volumes, considering RWBY/JNR's post-Volume 5 actions and characterisations to be downright despicable people whom have caused more damage than the show's villains did on their own, and who is irate that Neopolitan was easily forgiven of her crimes in what he perceives to be a hypocritical and unearned manner, while feeling that the Curious Cat was treated very harshly comparative to Neo for their very tragic circumstances and very low body-count. Whether in the Curious Cat's thoughts or in the dialogue, RWBY/J all get called out relentlessly for many of their canon actions which the author finds reprehensible, particularly in regards to the Fall of Atlas and their behavior in the Ever After. Ultimately, none of RWBY/J leave the Ever After alive, and Neo meets a self-inflicted Uncertain Doom, while the Curious Cat wins a happy ending for themself.
