Fanfic / The Tale of a Cat Most Curious

2 Following

The Tale of a Cat Most Curious is a RWBY fanfiction written by SyfyGuy2. Retelling the events of Volume 9 from the Curious Cat's perspective, it's explicitly a Deconstruction Fic and Revenge Fic against RWBY canon's Protagonist-Centered Morality tendencies.

The Tale of a Cat Most Curious contain examples of:

• Accusation Fic: The author doesn't have a high opinion of the RWBY protagonists' canon acts and behavior, especially in the Solitas arc and the Ever After, and it shows. A huge part of the Curious Cat's strategy to wearing Ruby down into their host is taking a verbal sledgehammer to many of hers and her teammates' invokedUnintentionally Unsympathetic canon actions and the invokedFridge Horror attached, and the Cat seems genuinely disgusted by the things the canon main heroes have done and their inability to internalize the notion that they aren't always morally right. The author also wrote a Remnant-set timeline on his Tumblr, albeit one of dubious canonicity to the main fic, which shows that the aftermath of Team RWBY's plan in Volume 8 was an absolute disaster, getting a huge chunk of the refugees killed in the long term by the desert kingdom's hostile locals, environmental factors and lack of resources.
• Adaptational Sympathy:
  • The fic, told primarily from the Curious Cat's point of view, treats them more sympathetically than the canon Volume 9. Emphasis is placed on their tragic and traumatic situation, lack of agency in it, mostly pragmatic villainy, and their extremely low, single-digit body count which they've maintained despite their universally advanced age for the setting. It's also shown that the Cat's canon sadism is only reserved for humans due to their trauma-founded prejudice against them, whereas the Cat still holds onto enough empathy for their fellow Afterans to show them a merciful side even if they'll still resort to putting them in harm's way when it helps the Cat; genuinely regretting causing the Hawker's destruction, and also being disgusted by all the damage Alyx inflicted on other Afterans. The Cat's perspective also more explicitly shows internal remorse for murdering Alyx, and reveals it was an act of understandable blind rage and that the Cat was horrified when they discovered afterwards that Alyx, as a human, had died permanently instead of Ascending like she would have if she were an Afteran.
  • invokedInverted for Neo, as the author considers her in canon to have been easily forgiven in an unearned manner. Neo's motivations for Avenging the Villain aren't treated nearly as sympathetically, with her wanton cruelty, murder and all the vast amount of harm that she's been culpable in with complete moral agency over her actions being deconstructed. Logically, Neo is such an awful person with so much blood on her hands, an unreasonably selfish motivation and full control of her faculties and actions, who's done practically nothing to earn anybody's forgiveness, that the Curious Cat look like a saint next to her.
• Adaptational Jerkass: Team RWBY is portrayed in much less heroic light than canon to the point of them coming across as comically evil.
• All for Nothing:
  • On top of the canon points about how Team RWBY's actions in the Solitas arc failed to save the Relics of Creation or Knowledge from Salem, it's pointed out that shuttle-teleporting Solitas' population to Vacuo of all places has completely undermined their intentions to save everyone in Solitas. Vacuo's environment and locals are dangerously socio-culturally hostile to Atlesians, and the only thing resembling a bastion of refuge for the Atlesians is Shade (which logically doesn't have nearly enough space, resources nor staff for an entire displaced other country's population). Shade is also where one of the last two Relics is located, so the newly-displaced refugees aren't removed from Salem's path of destruction like they might have been if the canon heroes had been clever enough to teleport them to any one of a number of more habitable and welcoming locations.
  • The Curious Cat before they fully snapped was doing nothing while they saw Alyx wreak havoc across the Ever After and poison Jaune because, despite the Cat's own misgivings about Alyx's actions, they were overwhelmingly desperate for Alyx to uphold her promise and free them from the Ever After, so they avoided antagonizing her into going back on her word. It didn't matter once Alyx broke her promise anyway during her Heel–Face Door-Slam's onset.
• All Take and No Give: Team RWBY. You either give them whatever they want from you – even if they never repay you proportionately nor meet you halfway – or you're automatically in the wrong. The group complaining about Ironwood’s secrecies and actions while they were deliberately lying to and keeping secrets from him, and weren't offering any better alternatives to his own plans throughout Volume 7, is a good example that's brought up by the other characters. Team RWBY don't even necessarily spare each-other from this treatment on an emotional level, as Ruby can attest on account of her friends ignoring her obvious signs of downward spiral after she spent eight volumes being the heart to all of them.
• Anti-Villain: Downplayed by the Curious Cat. They're an embittered, ruthless and 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 afterwards traumatised 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 them 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.
• Armor-Piercing Question: The Curious Cat poses several questions to Ruby Rose in stages, as part of their efforts to wear down her faith in herself and destroy her faith in _WBY/J by calling her out on their reprehensible actions in Atlas-Mantle which made everything worse for everyone all round. These questions include but are not limited to:
  "If I were you, I’d be more worried about all the people who are in the desert kingdom right now. Vacuum, was it? Vacuo? Why send people from a cold tundra into a hot, lawless desert where everyone hates them, again? Couldn’t you have just used the staff Relic to send them anywhere else and then used it to send yourselves to Vacuo? Isn’t Vacuo right back in that scary sorceress’s warpath?"
  "From what you’ve told me, Atlas is one of the kingdoms where prejudices against the Faunus were the worst. Did Blake do anything to try and persuade Ironwood to make things easier for the Atlas Faunus when you were all working under him?"
  "I suppose you did [have other things to worry about] once you had two cities and an insane general on your plate. But what about all the weeks before that, when you were going on missions for Ironwood and his marbles were still up there? Did Blake or your sister broach talking to Ironwood about it in that time?"
  "Correct me if I'm wrong, but Ironwood was prone to a lot of things except inaction, was he not? What was the worst that could come of Blake or your other friends telling him to help make things in his kingdom better for Faunus?"
  "It just... seems like those two [Blake and Yang] care for each-other very much. Much like how your poor father and uncle cared so much for your mother. They could barely function anymore when they lost her, even for yours and your sister's sake, no? Wasn't that when your sister took you into the Grimm woods looking for that Raven woman?"
  "Did you and your friends not think to look for others who fell?"
• Became Their Own Antithesis: Discussed. Ruby believes that Yang used to be an emotionally intelligent, thoughtful and kind young woman beneath her Boisterous Bruiser attitude, as well as a caring big sister, before the Fall of Beacon turned her into an immature, unaware, thoughtless and cruel meathead who can barely be bothered to acknowledge Ruby's existence, even when Ruby is clearly going through a breakdown.
• 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 in order 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-centred 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.
• Cain and Abel: Ruby and Yang's relationship increasingly deteriorates as Ruby is forced to recognize Yang's worst traits, including her emotional neglect of Ruby in favor of Blake.
• Can't Take Criticism: As part of the deconstruction of post-Beacon RWBY/J's characterisation, 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.
• The Chain of Harm: Blake Belladonna and Yang Xiao-Long's romantic relationship dynamic by the time of RWBY Volume 9 is deconstructed, as the Curious Cat notes Blake is having the same effect on Yang that Blake's psycho ex-boyfriend Adam Taurus previously had on her: making Yang codependent on their relationship and causing her to push her family away.
• Death by Adaptation: Two of Remnant's castaways in the Ever After whom survived in canon, namely Blake and Yang, are killed by the Curious Cat and indirectly by a betrayed Ruby.
• Deconstruction Fic:
  • It's heavily implied that Team RWBY's actions in mass teleporting Solitas' population to Vacuo while letting Atlas crash onto Mantle, far from being the stroke of genius which saves everyone that RWBY and their allies canonically make it out to be, has caused a humanitarian and international disaster of apocalyptic proportions due to all the logistics involved, and because the people being preserved as refugees (at least until Vacuo's very much anti-Solitas environment decimates them) doesn't change the strategic fact that the kingdom — which was Remnant's equivalent to Earth's United States, China and Russia all rolled into one — has been infrastructurally, geo-politically, territorially and economically wiped off the map amid a time of global crisis, with all the horrific consequences that such would realistically entail.
    • Likewise, it's suggested that Argus was also destroyed or at the very least left in a dire state after RWBY and their inner circle left it behind at the end of Volume 6 with its defences still in a crippled state after the Grimm were drawn in.
  • The fic shines a flashlight on how Team RWBY's and Jaune's canon behavior patterns in general and their results across the show are less indicative that they're righteous and badass kid heroes and powerful friends like canon makes them out to be, and more indicative that the canon main heroes' true natures are actually incompetent, arrogant and delusional manchildren with a malignant savior complex, whom will ignore any and all guilt and culpability for as long as they can convince themselves they're doing the right thing, are truly responsible for making everything worse in the bigger picture, and treat even their own friends and loved ones like crap when the tension mounts and the bonds are tested.
  • The canon Volume 9's framing of Team RWBY and Jaune as the heroes, Neo as the more forgivable of the two main villains, and the Curious Cat as the most despicable and irredeemable villain, is completely torn to shreds. The Curious Cat actually looks like a far less terrible person than Neo in more ways than not — especially since the Cat's curse of curiosity since their creation and their backstory are highly pitiable, their curse legitimately isn't their fault and essentially makes all their crimes fall under the insanity plea, and the Cat furthermore hasn't hurt anywhere near as many people with their actions as Neo or RWBY and Jaune already have with theirs. The fic argues that if anything, the Cat looks like a nominal hero for trying to stop Ruby from reverting back to her old ways, leading her friends back to Remnant, and continuing to make things worse there in a feedback loop.
  • Blake and Yang's post-Beacon relationship, far from looking heartwarming, cute or remotely healthy like the canon show perceives it to be; looks like a thoroughly toxic, obsessive influence on both of them which has helped them change for the worse and lose their empathy, based on their canon behavior shift with each-other versus everyone else plus the special treatment that the Ponderstorm gives them. Marrow's criticism from Volume 7 that Blake and Yang's fighting styles had grown too codependent — which they basically shrugged off by intimidating him with a fighting display and then glaring at him until he changed his tune, without them actually disproving his point — is also proven completely legit, when Yang is briefly separated from Blake in a fight and the latter is defeated in short order.
• Destructive Romance: Blake Belladonna and Yang Xiao-Long's growing (or overgrowing) romantic feelings and relationship have helped nurture a lot of negative traits in them while subsuming their positive traits. Yang has transformed from the compassionate, thoughtful, and emotionally intelligent protective big sister who raised Ruby; into a self-absorbed, self-righteous bitch with narcissistic traits, who only truly cares about chasing Blake's coattails, and she blatantly ignores and is unsympathetic to Ruby's and everyone else's wellbeing.
• Dies Differently in Adaptation: Little the Mouse, instead of being crushed underfoot by Neo, is shot with Hush.
• Dramatic Irony: Neo tells Ruby via her Semblance that Summer would be ashamed if she could see Ruby now, after all the damage that she and her team did in Volumes 7-8 due to their arrogance and pathological self-assumption that they always know morally better than everyone else. The canon Volume 9 finale showed that Summer was actually just as prone to arrogance and thinking she's the only one who can save the world as her daughters were, although it's still ambiguous if Summer would've gone so far as condoning Team RWBY's decision to destroy both of Atlas' cities.
• Ending the Abuse: A dark and bittersweet case. Ruby increasingly realizes how toxic and self-centered her friends marooned in the Ever After with her really are towards her, which leads to Ruby deciding to cut ties with WBY and Jaune for good, taking the Curious Cat's side because she's convinced that the Cat is A Lighter Shade of Black in the bigger picture (and because the Cat at least doesn't pick any bones about only caring about what Ruby can do for them).
• Even Evil Has Standards: The Curious Cat may be self-serving, manipulative and ruthless in getting through the door out of the Ever After, but they seem to be genuinely disgusted by Team RWBY's and Jaune's protagonist-centered morality, moral hypocrisy and self-righteousness which have ruined countless lives and done far more avoidable harm than good on their world. They're also disgusted by Neo's sadism and by how she kills innocents far more wantonly than the Cat, who usually only resorts to murder when it's a necessity.
• Fatal Flaw:
  • Pride and self-centeredness are at the roots of Team RWBY and Jaune's many flaws. Their self-righteousness, hypocrisy, arrogance, self-ignorance, selective lack of empathy and their need to be the heroes above all else; have altogether led them to alienate their allies, assist and act no better than their enemies, unwittingly do much more harm than the good they were aiming for, and it furthermore keeps them locked in a feedback loop of never learning the best lessons from their mistakes and being doomed to repeat them.
  • Also wrath, impulsiveness and single-mindedness in Yang's specific case. The fic showcases how she lets both her anger and her single-minded emotional fixation on Blake above all others dominate her actions and decisions, even after her canon Mental Health Recovery Arc with Taiyang, and she short-sightedly lashes out even at her own allies whenever she feels incensed or slighted. This leads to history repeating itself on Yang when the Curious Cat attacks Blake and Yang loses control of her temper, setting her up for her doom.
• Generation Xerox: Played for Drama. The Curious Cat points out that Yang has acted far more like Raven than she admits to being, having done many of the very things that Raven was chewed out for like prioritizing her own self-interests, hurting her loved ones and betraying people, while acting sanctimonious to justify herself much like Raven does. Furthermore, Yang and Ruby end up having a serious falling out and coming to blows over a perceived betrayal, not unlike what happened between Raven and their uncle Qrow in Volume 5. Yang ends up in a very similar position to Qrow at the end of his Volume 7 fight with Clover: watching someone she cares about die in large part as a consequence of hers, theirs and their other allies' ill-thought-out actions and decisions, and Yang like Qrow promptly transfers almost all the blame off of them and onto a single party — Yang even screams the same words at Blake's direct attacker as Qrow did at Clover's.
• Hate Fic: Zig-Zagged. The author despises the canon show's Protagonist-Centered Morality effects and sees the majority of the canon heroes as noxious invokeddesignated heroes, but he also very much likes the Curious Cat's character and confirmed that the latter was as much his motivation for writing the fic as the former. The author also doesn't seem to specifically hate writing the Ever After when expanding on the Cat's relationship with it.
• Hazy-Feel Turn: The Curious Cat is trying to invoke this trope in Ruby. They want Ruby to switch allegiances from her friends (a group of well-intentioned but ultimately mass destructive, pretentiously selfish and emotionally malignant Tautological Templars), to the Cat (who is an openly self-serving Manipulative Bastard and also a murderer, but who is also self-aware, has a more legitimately tragic and pitiful nature, and hasn’t gotten anywhere near as many people wrongfully hurt or killed as Ruby's group have by their actions).
• 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 apparently 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-centred 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 civilisation'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 traumatised, and before that, he failed to stop either Alyx's destructive antics or her causing the Cat's final push into insanity.
• Hypocrite: The fic is something of a Take That! towards the unintentional Protagonist-Centered Morality of the show. The Curious Cat tries to call out Team RWBY and Jaune for viewing themselves as heroes when they've ultimately caused more harm than good by acting like they're the only ones who can be trusted to save the day, ultimately acting just like all the allies they've betrayed thanks to that mindset, but Ruby (who has started coming to this conclusion herself) is the only one to actually acknowledge this as a valid criticism.
• Ignored Epiphany: _WBY/J concluding during the Ever After arc that they're "being too hard on themselves" after questioning their failures in Atlas-Mantle, and that their screwups don't matter so long as they keep trying and eventually get it right in the future, are portrayed this way. The author openly feels that the canon version of this event unintentionally came across as the characters refusing to take responsibility for their actions which have done more harm than good, doubling down on their mistakes which got people killed and gave their enemy the upper-hand, and continuing to endanger more people in the future by hypocritically treating them as expendable objects for RWBY/J's own hero fantasies and protagonist-centred morality.
• It's All About Me: Seemingly a cast-wide theme, as all of the Volume 9 main characters except for Little and Juniper are shown to be pretty selfish to some degree. The Curious Cat is willing to manipulate, hurt and even kill in order to relieve their own overwhelming mental agony after milennia trapped in the Ever After without answers nor a way to Ascend theirself. Team RWBY and Jaune, despite viewing themselves as sincere heroes saving the world, are truly self-absorbed and narcissistic manchildren whom want the world to revolve around and satiate their hero syndrome, and they regularly prioritize themselves, their own impulses and their personal connections over everybody else but refuse to acknowledge the hypocrisy. Neo, as per canon, is a murderous sadist on a personal Avenging the Villain quest which is absolutely steeped in Moral Myopia, and she has the least regard for innocent lives out of all the characters.
• Jerkass Has a Point:
  • Although she's just saying it to spitefully torture Ruby past the Despair Event Horizon, this Deconstruction Fic makes it clear that Neo is very right when she rips Ruby to shreds for objectively doing far more harm than good with her well-intentioned actions on Remnant, acting hypocritically, not thinking through her actions' consequences, and initially trying to play the victim instead of owning up to her conscience when the consequences catch up to her.
  • Likewise, the arguments that the Curious Cat presents to make Ruby give up on her dream of being a hero if she keeps getting people hurt, and to turn her against her inattentive and self-centered teammates whom have acted extremely uncaring to her in the Ever After; are presented as correct, even if the Cat does have a very self-serving motivation for pushing Ruby towards this mindset.
  • Although she's largely just saying it to deflect blame for her own screw-ups and their consequences, Yang is technically correct to point out that Ruby most likely never would have turned her back on her teammates and Jaune without the Curious Cat's active manipulations, and that the Cat directly and actively killed Blake.
• Karmic Death: Two of the castaways from Remnant, namely Blake and Yang, are killed by the Curious Cat and indirectly by a betrayed Ruby, one after the other, which is treated as karma for the former pair ignoring and having no sympathy for Ruby's psychological breakdown while prioritizing their relatively-selfish romantic feelings for each-other over everything and everyone else. It's also implied that Neo might have met a karmic end herself from the Jabberwalker, who she attacked first and whose powers she was using to storm over and terrorize innocent Afterans, denying any killed by the walker's power of their Ascension.
• Knight Templar: RWBY/J see themselves as heroes doing what's right and trying to save the world, but this portrayal takes their most criticised and invokedunintentionally 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 whom 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 internalising, their mistakes like the plague. RWBY/J function as the antagonists to the Curious Cat's protagonist.
• A Lighter Shade of Black: The Curious Cat is portrayed by the author as the least despicable and most sympathetic main character from 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 pursuit of their goals, they have a much lower body-count than Neo or RWBY/J do after the Fall of Atlas, and 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 characterised as delusional, hypocritical, self-absorbed and petty knights templar who accelerated James Ironwood's sanity slippage at the worst possible time for Atlas-Mantle, created 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 internalising anything from their mistakes.
• Mike Nelson, Destroyer of Worlds: Discussed. As the Curious Cat and later Neo point out, Team RWBY and the other canon heroes: for all that they thought they were helping people and were morally justified, they actually share a huge amount of the fault for General Ironwood losing his mind in the first place, and the specifics of their Volume 8 plan to try and save Solitas' inhabitants amid the resulting mess essentially genocided an entire kingdom, permanently crippled the global Remnant infrastructure even further (amid a time of existential war against Salem no less), and allowed Salem to gain two Relics which gets her a whopping 50% closer to her world-ending goals. It's also suggested that Argus fell to the Grimm after the events of Volume 6, because the canon heroes didn't think to stick around long enough after the Leviathan's death to make sure the city would be able to recover from the Grimm crisis which they were unwittingly half the trigger of.
• Moral Myopia:
  • WBY and Jaune's moral compasses can be summarized as "when people we don't agree with on everything do this thing, then it's always bad, but when we do this thing ourselves, then it's always good and just". They've been constantly entitled to unconditional faith and trust from their allies which they don't act obligated to return, they behave this way despite their increasingly-questionable results, and they hold others to moral standards which they don't uphold themselves. When someone else doesn't tell Team RWBY the whole truth, openly questions them, turns their back on them or is actively hostile to them, or when someone else doesn't fight for innocent lives when it's impossible to save everyone, it's a cardinal sin; but when RWBY/J themselves behave in those exact same ways, it's always somehow justified in their eyes.
  • The Curious Cat also thinks Neopolitan is unworthy of sympathy, since she's a remorseless and gleefully sadistic hitwoman who murders people wantonly, joined Salem's faction during their genocidal assault on Atlas-Mantle entirely of her own free will, and her quest to kill Ruby boils down to nothing more than avenging her own personal loss of an equally unrepentant and selfish man without care for the innocents that she and Roman Torchwick have themselves hurt and murdered.
• Narcissist: Team RWBY and Jaune Arc's canon unintentionally-questionable behavior and actions are deconstructed to show how narcissistic they come across as being — for all their self-righteous prattle of being the heroes who "protect people who can't help themselves," they always put their own wants before all the civilians they're supposed to be protecting while being chronic and complete hypocrites, and they care more about their self-images of themselves as the heroes of their own narratives than they do about prioritizing the objective wellbeing of people outside their group; instinctively writing off anyone who disagrees with them or refuses to let them have their own ways for any reasons (General Ironwood, Cordovin, the Curious Cat, even each-other in the Ever After) as enemies or fools to be circumvented. Blake Belladonna and Yang Xiao-Long in particular refuse to learn from their mistakes or admit that they might have been in the wrong after the Fall of Atlas and after they sent the populations into one of the worst places on Remnant for them, and they act like their romantic feelings for each other are the axis of the universe which matter more than others' lives or Yang's baby sister. Meanwhile, a significant part of Ruby Rose and Jaune Arc's respective angsts and distress in The Ever After aside from their legitimate trauma and grievances is that they don't measure up to their self-images and desires to be the hero who saves everyone.
• Never My Fault: Team RWBY are called out for having a crippling problem of refusing to take accountability for their mistakes or admit that they were wrong, with Yang Xiao-Long and Blake Belladonna being the worst two of the bunch. _WBY don't take any accountability for accelerating General Ironwood's sanity slippage in the first place by lying to him and going behind his back in the leadup to the Fall of Atlas, nor admit to their own hypocrisy in doing so. Ruby Rose desperately tries and fails to absolve herself of blame for her team's worst actions as she breaks down, and Yang refuses to admit any fault for _WBY/J pushing Ruby to her breakdown with how they treated her and instead blames Ruby for behaving in such a way.
• Next Tier Power-Up: Exposed to the Ever After, Team RWBY's and Jaune's Semblances eventually mutate into more powerful and potent forms much like Neo's did.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!: Almost everything Teams RWBY and JNR did after leaving Beacon that affected other people outside their group was this trope if it wasn't them taking credit for other characters' deeds, especially the things that RWBY and JNR did in Atlas. Ironwood goes insane just as Salem is attacking Atlas? He went insane there and then because RWBY and JNR hypocritically lied to him, and their actions kept feeding and vindicating his trust issues. RWBY and JNR have "saved" the population of Atlas by forcibly emigrating them to Vacuo while sacrificing the physical cities? Well, not only have they destroyed the most powerful military-industrial kingdom on Remnant and colossally shot Remnant's chances of defeating Salem in the foot, but Vacuo's inhabitants, environment and climate are going to be very unwelcoming to displaced Atlesians, and with the Relic of Destruction still at Shade Academy, the evacuees have been placed right back in Salem's warpath. Plus, if it hadn't been for RWBY and JNR taking the Relic of Creation out of its vault for no good reason instead of sealing it back in its vault after using it, then Salem might have only captured one of the Relics instead of capturing two. And not only did Team RWBY using the Relic of Creation to put Penny in a human body fail to save her life long-term when Cinder attacked, but it might have actually caused Penny's final death, since her robot body could have at least been repaired and revived again.
• Noodle Incident: Downplayed. The Curious Cat's thoughts and dialogue drop a few more factoids about the Lively Carpenter, who was mentioned once in canon by name only. Apparently, the Lively Carpenter ascended and became the Picky Carpenter after Alyx ruined his workshop and caused an unpleasant incident involving oysters. The Lively Carpenter was also responsible for giving Alyx's and the Cat's companion, Jaune, a spyglass spell.
• "Not So Different" Remark: Neopolitan admits to Ruby Rose that as much as she hates her, she doesn't think Ruby is all that different from her and Roman Torchwick anymore. After the Fall of Beacon, Ruby has lied, stolen, cheated and survived, fulfilling the ethos by which Roman lived and which he was ranting in his final moments.
• 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.
• Precision F-Strike: The Curious Cat and Ruby both normally have squeaky clean vocabularies, which makes it all the more impactful when a furious Ruby and a disgusted Curious Cat call Yang a "selfish bitch".
• Revenge Fic:invoked 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 behaviour in the Ever After. Ultimately, none of RWBY/J leave the Ever After alive, and Neo meets a self-inflicted Uncertain Doom.
• Spared by the Adaptation: The Curious Cat avoids their canon death.
• Stating the Simple Solution: The Curious Cat points out to Team RWBY that they could've avoided dumping the entire Kingdom of Atlas' population into Vacuo — which the Cat observes sounds like it's an absolutely terrible place to evacuate millions of Atlesians to for a number of reasons, to a point where it completely defeats the entire purpose of trying to save as many Atlesians as possible — by just instructing the Relic of Creation to connect the portals it was making to multiple destinations instead of one, including much safer locations for the refugees. The realization of this hits Ruby hard.
• Token Good Teammate: Ruby is the most genuinely remorseful out of herself and her four marooned friends for their canon hang-ups and all the harm they've done, and she's the only one of them who doesn't decide that the solution is to keep doubling down on their toxic positivity and Can't Take Criticism attitudes.
• 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 which hurt and traumatized both the Cat and other Afterans, and due to Jaune and Lewis' inaction and failure to do anything that made it better. It's more emphasized by the fact this fic shows the Cat's sadism after they were driven mad is reserved for their prejudice against people from Remnant; when it comes to other Afterans, they're notably less vicious and don't enjoy causing them to come to harm.
• Uncertain Doom: Neopolitan meets an uncertain demise the last time she's seen. She's either eaten alive by the Jabberwalker, or she's rescued by another Afteran at the last moment.
• Villain Protagonist: The Curious Cat, the final main antagonist of Volume 9, is the protagonist. They never redeem theirself, but they're depicted as A Lighter Shade of Black compared to Neopolitan and RWBY/J.
• Villain Has a Point: Invoked. Although Neo is very much a villain and an antagonist, she, like the more anti-heroic Curious Cat, makes several valid points about Ruby's and her team's dubious actions and mistakes which led them to do far more harm than good on Remnant and proved that Team RWBY aren't as morally superior as they think they are. The Curious Cat exploits this as part of their plan to make Ruby a Willing Channeler.
• We Used to Be Friends: The Curious Cat is trying to invoke this between Ruby and the other castaways from Remnant as that she'll become the Cat's host, via trying to force Ruby towards a realization about how un-heroic the canon main heroes truly are and how much Jaune and WBY have emotionally taken Ruby for granted.
• With Friends Like These...: Deconstructed. Team RWBY plus Jaune Arc's canon interactions and relationship dynamics in the Atlas and Ever After arcs, rather than coming across as those of friends who ultimately have each-other's backs, come across as _WBY/J barely caring about Ruby Rose as anything more as an idol and source of positivity who they parasitise; trying to gaslight Ruby back into acting like their ideal hero instead of healthily addressing her human psychological issues, otherwise ignoring her issues until they blow up, and placing more priority on joining Jaune's pity parties (however sympathetic they were) or on Blake Belladonna and Yang Xiao-Long's increasingly codependent and toxic romance. All of this gives the Curious Cat, who is theirself disgusted at _WBY/J's behaviour, ammunition to drive Ruby away from _WBY/J.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: The Curious Cat. On top of all the Cat's canon points towards this trope: the Cat also suffered heartbreak after heartbreak over the milennia as many Afterans the Cat had befriended either got eaten and permanently destroyed by the Jabberwalker, or they otherwise Ascended sooner or later, changed and forgot about their histories with the Cat, jading the Cat further and detaching them from the other Afterans. During the Cat's journey with Alyx, they were appalled by their new human friend's cruelty and reckless actions, but the Cat forced theirself to put up with it so that Alyx would uphold her promise to take the Cat through the door to Remnant. When Alyx broke her promise anyway just as she and the Cat were a few steps away from freedom, the enraged Cat's subsequent murder of her was an act of blind rage, and the Cat wasn't truly aware that Alyx would stay dead instead of Ascending to the Tree for healing until it was too late for them to take back what they'd done.
• World of Jerkass: None of the main characters from Volume 9, excepting the non-feline Afterans Little and Juniper (whom aren't even in focus in this fic), are good people. The Curious Cat, Team RWBY, Jaune, Neo: all of them are selfish, self-serving, guilty and have innocent blood on their hands (even if RWBY and Jaune really don't want to admit those things about themselves). It says a lot that the one among them with the very least blood on their hands and the least agency in all their villainy is still a Manipulative Bastard extraordinaire and a second-degree murderer, whereas the rest of them are all culpable in the mass destruction of entire cities and kingdoms.
• Write Back to the Future: The Curious Cat once tried to invoke a second-hand case of this in their desperation to learn why their creators left them and the Ever After. The Cat convinced other Afterans to use the Stopwatch Fruits to go back in time (since the Cat can't go back in time theirself due to the Fruits having no effect on them), all the way back to before the Brother Gods had left the Ever After, with instructions to get as many answers to the Cat's questions as possible in that time and leave a record of their findings for the Cat to find in the present time. It apparently didn't work.