#also rosegarden people who thought oscar being in V9 would have like Solved ruby's breakdown are annoying

[bestworstcase]

Ooo share the unorthodox ruby & oscar thoughts. Romance has never been a draw for me and in this case fanon flattens and honestly mutilates the significance and nuance to their relationship. There’s a lot of interesting things going on here that gets lost and I think that’s a shame

right so the rosegarden orthodoxy goes something like: "oscar is the Only Person who sees and understands the pressure ruby is under and the pain this causes, and the central conceit of his character is about learning how to take care of her because she is precious to him and needs to be taken care of." central to this orthodoxy is the reading of 'the little prince' as a romantic love story between the prince and the rose, with ruby interpreted as "his rose."

for a more thorough breakdown of my thoughts on the intertextual layer, refer to this post. the TL;DR is this: the rose is not the prince's partner—she is his dependent. he returns to her as her caretaker: a child grown up and ready to embrace the joys and responsibilities of parenthood. 'the little prince' is an allegory about parent-child relationships and the importance of treating children with respect and kindness. fortunately for the rosegarden shippers in the audience, ruby is not the rose. she alludes to the snake—the one character in the story who meets the prince as a friend and an equal. 

now, before getting into the weeds i do want to stress that, 1. i'm not a shipper and i don't "ship rosegarden" in the usual sense, but 2. ruby/oscar is canon and narratively important and i think about it in those terms.

"but oscar is a child, he's fifteen, he's two years younger than—" thank you for your opinion, person who ships ruby with another character 2+ years older than her, i'll take that under advisement. 

"but ruby doesn't need a love interest—" no character 'needs' a love interest, but rwby is a love story about fairytales and its romantic arcs are thematically motivated.

"but he has ozpin in his head and that makes it—" weird, yes. this tension is the fulcrum upon which the romantic arc turns and, also, it is going to be resolved by way of breaking the curse and removing ozma from oscar's head. this is a fairytale. what is not clicking.

here is my first unorthodox ruby/oscar thought: it is not complicated. the set up is really quite clear and if the rosegarden shippers would quit barking up irrelevant trees for five minutes they might notice the forest, which is to say, the foundational argument for canonicity is simply this:

marrow sees yang's disastrous stab at flirting with blake and comments, exasperated, "man, i did not sign up to be a babysitter." later, marrow watches ruby and oscar stammer through an awkward conversation resolving their volume-spanning emotional conflict and mutters, "ugh, kids." marrow's commentary underscores the tangible subtext of romantic interest in both exchanges and implies an equivalency between blake/yang and ruby/oscar.

the reunion scene in V8 is structured such that the platonic reunions occur first—ruby rushes out to hug yang, then clasps jaune's hands while yang hugs weiss—before the more lingering romantic ones. yang goes to reassure blake that things are okay and the bees forehead touch happens; ren steps forward to ask where nora is; ruby says oscar's name and goes to embrace him before emerald's presence distracts her. this again positions ruby/oscar together with the other textual romances.

that's it. there are plenty of supporting details with which to build out a more comprehensive argument, of course, but the narrative flags ruby/oscar by grouping that relationship together with the other two main pairings. (rwby does the same thing in a more overt way to confirm blake/yang […again] in V7; nora tries to initiate a romantic confession by comparing herself and ren to them.)

ozpin retreats from oscar's mind, leaving oscar free to be his own person—"i started to feel like me"—and during this time oscar comes into his own he develops an obvious crush on ruby as the narrative begins to not-so-subtly move this relationship into a romantic context. ozpin's absence opens the door for the pairing and ozma's return creates a seemingly-insurmountable obstacle. the romantic arc is about surmounting that obstacle—separating ozma and oscar—so that oscar can be free to live his own life.

it's not complicated.

so with all of that being said, let's talk about the notion—central to rosegarden orthodoxy—that oscar is uniquely supportive of ruby, and never leans on her the way all the other characters do.

in a word: no.

the cornerstone piece of evidence supporting this reading is the dojo scene in V5, construed as oscar "getting ruby to open up emotionally" leading to his recognition that "this must be really hard for her, too." but:

ruby comes downstairs to find oscar doubled over, panting heavily, with ozpin's cane in his hands—he's training alone, pushing himself almost to the point of collapse. this is not good for him or physically safe, which ruby would know as someone trained as a warrior from childhood. she says: "you're really getting better, huh? are you hungry? it's almost dinnertime." this is a soft way of telling oscar that he's done enough for the night and he should take a break. ruby is checking on him to make sure he's okay.

oscar agrees that he was "about to call it a night anyway," ruby asks about his past, he answers casually, she tells him he "looks like a natural!"—and then oscar looks down at long memory and says "it's strange. i've only had this cane for a few weeks, but i feel like i've had it for a lifetime. longer, even… i sound like a crazy person." 

"i mean, uh… yeah, just a little. but at this pace, you'll be combat ready in no time!" says ruby, and then catches herself echoing penny and gets sad.

what happened here?

oscar is training this hard because ozpin told him to, explicitly in order to increase the tempo of the curse: "oscar can give me temporary control, but he'll need to strengthen his body and aura. he'll inherit my muscle memory in time, but training will expedite the process." the reason oscar seems like a prodigy is ozpin's skill and experience bleeding through. 

in ruby's mind, "you look like a natural!" is a compliment. but what oscar hears is a reminder that his life is no longer his own: he gazes down at ozpin's weapon and states that he feels like it's belonged to him for lifetimes—and he doesn't like that. "i sound like a crazy person."

the reminder of what's happening to oscar makes ruby uncomfortable—she deflects and tries to put on a happy face, but the truth slips through. "you'll be combat ready in no time!" associates oscar with penny—who is dead. neither ruby nor oscar will say it out loud, but they both understand that he's going to die as ozpin's soul amalgamates with his. and when oscar begins to open up about how scared he is, ruby flinches away—gotta stay positive!!!—only to trip on her grief for penny.

her smile falters. she tucks into herself and turns away. in trying to hide from the thought of oscar being erased, ruby reminded herself of penny. she's already watched helplessly while two of her friends died. she is scared of letting herself get close to oscar, knowing that she won't be able to save him either. so she tries to withdraw.

but she's the first—and so far, only—person oscar has ever tried to talk to about how scared he is, and what he sees is ruby brushing him off and turning her back. "how do you handle all of this?! […] i'm… scared. i'm more scared than i've ever been in my life, more than i ever thought was possible. i always knew that i wanted to be more than a farmhand, but this? who would ask for this?"

<- note the echo here of what ozpin said to him in V4: "you do have an opportunity [for] greatness: greatness in knowing that when the world needed help, you were the one to reach out your hand. it won't come without hardship, without sacrifice, but i know you don't want to live the rest of your life working as a farmhand in mistral," which oscar experienced as a violation ("you just decided to read my thoughts?!") and which ozpin justified on the grounds that "well, they're our thoughts now."

the dojo scene is not about oscar offering ruby emotional support or pushing her to open up about her feelings because he can see that she's hurting. the dojo scene is about oscar breaking down and begging ruby to hear him, to be here with him instead of turning away because he's terrified of what ozpin is doing to him and ruby is dealing with all the same problems but acts like she doesn't care. "people have tried to kill you! the world's about to go to war all over again! how are you okay with any of this?!"—he lashes out at her because he's seeking a real connection and ruby keeps brushing him off.

so ruby—who is very empathetic and insightful enough to recognize why oscar just exploded at her—tells him honestly why she turned away. two of her friends died at beacon, and she is scared specifically of letting anyone else be killed. this is an important emotional moment for her in that she really did need to talk about penny and pyrrha, yes, but that's not quite the point of this scene.

rather, it's about the choice to be vulnerable and trust each other with absolute emotional honesty. oscar is afraid to die. ruby is afraid to lose another friend, and therefore afraid to let herself become close to oscar. he opens up to her about his fears and challenges her to reciprocate, and she does. that's the basis of their bond. by extension the dojo scene also sets up the core emotional conflict underpinning the romantic arc, which is that ruby can't bring herself to face the truth about what ozma's curse is doing to oscar.

that comes between them here. it floats uneasily around them in the aftermath of what jinn tells them: "i'm just going to be another one of his lives, aren't i?" says oscar, and "of course not," says ruby, "you're your own person—" and "don't lie to him, ruby," says qrow, "we're better than that."

at the end of V6, ruby exclaims that "oscar made a successful crash landing! he's a fourteen year old farmhand!" and oscar squirms and admits that ozpin helped him do that. in V7, yang confronts ruby on her choice to lie to ironwood by asking "how did oscar feel about that?" and the way oscar felt about it is hesitant to take the lamp back and fretting that "hiding things from ironwood, doesn't that feel like what ozpin did to us?" and ruby echoes that fear to qrow in the next episode. 

the rest of V7 is filled with references, courtesy of ironwood, to oscar's similarity to ozpin. "eventually," ironwood tells him, "you won't even know who's who anymore." but oscar never stops trying to assert himself as an individual. in V8, salem rubs the thinning boundary between him and ozma in oscar's face and that terrifies him so badly that he insists upon staying put under torture rather than let ozpin take over or risk using magic because "every time we use magic, i can feel us merging faster." 

they exit the volume more in sync, notionally on equal terms—and then in the ever after, this happens:

ruby cuts neo's simulacrum of ozpin down and reveals oscar, mortally wounded. she's spent four volumes pretending everything is fine—encouraged by ozpin's withdrawal and some of her grief eased by  penny's return—and all that denial ends here. she experiences what scared her back in the dojo scene, getting close to oscar only to watch him die, subsumed completely by ozpin.

here's what you're most afraid of. what are you going to do about it?

<- pyrrha is gone. penny is gone, and not coming back. but oscar is alive, and ruby can't pretend anymore that the way things are is okay. she's going to have this image of oscar dying in ozpin burning in her mind every time she sees oscar and (just as nora's injury led ren to admit his feelings and yang's apparent death gave her and blake the push they needed to take the next step) that demands change.

what that change will look like is an open question—it could be anything from ruby simply opening up to oscar about how scared she is of losing him in particular to ruby actively trying to come up with a way to save him—but whatever it is will move toward separating ozma from oscar.

similarly, while oscar recognizes at the end of the dojo scene that "this must be really hard for her too," his mild hero-worship of her continues unabated throughout V5 (think about oscar shaking her and telling her "get up! we need you!" while she's unconscious at haven) and even after they find a more even footing during V7-8 he still contributes to the weight on her shoulders (it is oscar saying "all this doubt and and worry and distrust, it isn't getting us anywhere" that causes ruby to snap and run out of the room in V8). oscar, too, is forced to confront the fact of her mortality. how does he respond when ruby turns out to be alive?

well.

one of the obstacles to the ozlem reconciliation is that ozma has never allowed himself to empathize with salem's grief—he was dead, he never saw her anguish, and the way jinn narrates ozpin's side of the story dismisses the very real pain and anguish salem felt as merely a pretext for what was really just spiteful lashing out at the gods. ozma leapt at the chance to return to her but he has never really understood that she felt the same depth of feeling for him.

he's in oscar's head right now. they are separate people still, but ozma feels what oscar feels and thinks what he thinks and remembers his memories—and also they're on speaking terms again. and oscar has been put in salem's position: he looked up to ruby as a noble hero, he had nascent romantic feelings for her, and now she's gone. oscar to sit with that for several weeks, maybe a couple months, before ruby comes back. and ozma has to bear witness.

i think the change this incites for oscar will be less about ruby than it is a reason for oscar to challenge ozma, building from the ways oscar challenges him in V8 (to trust oscar, to become more honest, to face his mistakes) and giving oscar a chance to continue to maintain his own identity separate from ozma. which again, facilitates an eventual physical separation and the ozlem reconciliation.

<- rip to all the rosegardeners who want ruby/oscar to be the rebound and/or narrative refutation of ozlem. it is not that. lol.

#also rosegarden people who thought oscar being in V9 would have like Solved ruby's breakdown are annoying