#some couples go on dates | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

bestworstcase · 2 years

Text

ok so. the timeline.

besides seasonal changes to the environment the best temporal marker we have in rwby is the academic calendar for the huntsmen academies. for simplicity i’m making the following assumptions:

1. BASH follow the same calendar

2. we are in the northern hemisphere

3. calendar units on remnant do not significantly differ from our own

i’m going to use the names of gregorian months instead of “1st/2nd/3rd winter month,” for ease of understanding, with seasons blocked out like dec/jan/feb, mar/apr/may, jun/jul/aug, and spt/oct/nov.

note: the second assumption requires that we also assume that the canonical map is NOT a world map. again assuming that remnant is earthlike in the essentials, the equator should then go approximately here:

…and then we have to assume that either this an extremely distorted projection OR remnant has way more ocean coverage than earth does and cartographers just kind of crop out all the extra water.

the clocks shown in the cct tower in V2 indicate that mistral (11:20) is three hours ahead of atlas/vale (8:20) and nine ahead of vacuo (2:20); which, again assuming all relevant variables are earthlike, would make the approximate distance between them roughly comparable to the distance between new york city and madrid—and given their relative positions on the map, either days on remnant are quite a bit shorter than ours orrr there’s a massive ocean between the east coast of anima and the west coast of sanus which DOESNT MATTER FOR THE TIMELINE DISCUSSION WHATSOEVER i just think it’s neat :)

back to the BASH academic calendar: from bits of dialogue in primarily V2, V3, and V5, we have a… relatively comprehensive understanding of what an academic year looks like. we’ll assume that a semester is 18 weeks.

vale has cold, snowy winters, shown in V3; it’s lush and green when V1 begins and remains so until V3, when ruby (and various environmental changes) indicate that it’s now autumn. since V1 encompasses the whole first semester, and V2 the first several weeks(?) of the second, the first semester of the academic calendar must begin in mid-to-late spring, likely the middle of april. it ends in early august, and with a two-week break (V2.1) before the next semester, that puts the beginning of the second semester right at the end of august.

the vytal festival is a complication here, because a significant number of students from the other three academies come to the host academy for a considerable length of time, which would impose a critical disruption of education once every other year for all huntsmen/huntresses in training given that the festival and pre-festival events seem to last for several months coinciding with the fall term—the simplest way to account for this is to assume that students intending to participate in the vytal tournament get enrolled in the hosting academy for the second semester, making this a formalized study-abroad program. (this is never stated outright and somewhat obscured by the “other students arriving for the festival” verbiage and how light V2-3 are on classroom/study scenes, but the integration of international students into beacon does pretty unambiguously support this reading.) all of this to say the festival is concurrent with the normal academic semester, rather than interrupting it with an extended holiday.

the weather stays fair throughout V2, and is noted to be “getting colder” early in V3; also, preparations for the vytal festival begin in vale during the break, toward the end of august. the festival appears to be more akin to an international expo than a holiday, albeit one small enough to occur biennially, so an event lasting somewhere in the neighborhood of 6-8 weeks after prep time of several weeks sounds about right. since the tournament is said to be the pinnacle of the festival, it likely takes place at or near the end. this would make V2 about 5-7 weeks in length and place V3, and the vytal tournament, around the beginning of october, which ties pretty well with the shifting weather.

under normal circumstances the fall semester would end in mid december, followed by an extended winter/spring break lasting until the start of the spring semester.

as a point of interest, on remnant the cultural associations with the seasons—as established by ozma, who also designed the huntsmen system—go like this:

winter (creation): “center yourself and think reflectively to gain awareness of who you are and what you can contribute to the world”

spring (knowledge): “nurture the life around you, and remember to stop and smell the roses”

summer (destruction): “don’t view the world at a distance—take an active part in it”

fall (choice): “be thankful for what you have and show your gratitude.”

and this lines up quite well with the structure of the academic calendar: there is an extended break during the winter and first half of spring, ideal for reflection on and integration of what was learned during the school year; the first semester begins in spring, the season of knowledge and fresh beginnings, and continues for most of the summer, which is all about participating actively in the world (as huntsmen are trained to do!). then the second semester covers the entirety of the fall and the first few weeks of winter, thus gratitude and appreciation leading to reflection and growth. the “knowledge, then choice” pattern repeated frequently throughout the show—including in ozpin’s welcoming speech at the beginning of the first semester—is followed in the academic calendar as well. all of which is to say, this is absolutely an academic calendar cooked up by ozma, the man is obsessed with symbols.

so. with the basics established we can approximate the in-universe length of each volume up to V6 pretty precisely:

V1 is 18-20 weeks long, depending on how much of it takes place during the two-week-long semester break.

V2 lasts for approximately one month, plus 1-2 weeks.

V3 picks up at the beginning of the tournament and spans most of it. it’s not entirely clear how long the tournament lasts, but there are eight finalists for the singles: so the doubles round is eight bouts, and the teams round sixteen. the singles round itself requires seven matches to arrive at a singular champion. thirty-one fights in total, for the whole tournament. dialogue between qrow and the barman during the teams round indicates that matches are fought more or less back-to-back; being very conservative and saying that the average bout in both teams and doubles rounds lasts fifteen minutes, with fifteen minute intervals scheduled between bouts, the teams round clocks in at eight hours and the doubles, four. it is… conceivable that the tournament is a three day event; maybe five, if the teams and doubles round are split across two afternoons each. there just aren’t enough competitors to stretch it out for much longer than that.

3.1 and 3.2 are contiguous and 3.3 begins around sundown, at most 10-15 minutes after the end of the previous episode, and continues until dark. the doubles round begins in 3.4 the following day and continues in 3.5. there’s a button at the end of 3.4 where it’s nighttime and winter is leaving, so either the doubles round IS split into two days, or rwby simply skipped ahead a few hours from winter’s goodbye to her actual departure from vale in 3.4 to maintain (more important) emotional/thematic continuity over strict chronological order, and then skipped back to the afternoon of the same day to continue the doubles matches in 3.5. i think both are valid readings here. in any case, 3.5 ends in the evening and 3.6 picks up immediately where it left off, then jumps forward to the next day with the beginning of the singles round. 3.7 is primarily a flashback episode, with present events concurrent with the latter half of 3.6; in 3.8 the yang incident has postponed the remaining matches, but they’re scheduled to resume in the evening; and aside from the falling action in 3.12, the whole rest of the volume takes place in a matter of hours during the evening/night of 3.8—so, all signs point to the vast majority of V3 taking place over the course of only 3-4 days (depending on how you read the nighttime button on 3.4).

beacon falls in early october. ruby is in a silver glare coma for an uncertain length of time, but long enough for the inner circle to confirm ozpin’s death (reading between the lines of what qrow tells ruby, he’s already retrieved the cane and is following instructions given for the event of ozpin’s death) and for huntsmen to stabilize the situation in vale. a few days at minimum, possibly more like a week or two. thereafter there is a time skip of 1-2 months, long enough for winter to set in but not for the snow cover to get more than a couple inches deep. so inclusive of the falling action time skips, V3 ends around the middle of december.

there is another time skip of several months between the end of V3 and V4, which picks up in mid-to-late spring. (this tracks with pretty well with everyone’s travel time: weiss gets flown back to atlas and has been stuck there for a good long while by the time V4 picks up; rnjr traveled mostly on foot all the way from patch island to eastern sanus, hopped a boat to anima, and are now on the final leg of the journey toward mistral; and blake got on a boat that had to get around sanus and then all the way down to the southern hemisphere to reach menagerie, possibly with other stops along the way, and is still on the boat when the volume picks up.)

V4 is annoyingly vague on the passage of time in comparison to the previous three volumes, but it realistically must last at least a couple months. this is because it begins in the spring, and:

V5 picks a couple days, tops, after the ending of V4, and “approximately one month” before the beginning of the fall semester; ergo, V5 begins at the end of july, and ends during the full moon in august, immediately before the fall semester begins. thus V4 begins sometime in the middle or end of spring or early summer and lasts until the end of july, so anywhere from 2-4 months

V6 begins two weeks after the end of V5 and lasts four days: the apathy arc spans two, with rwbymoq arriving in argus around sunset on the second day; the whole crew visits the military base on day three, with jnr being filled in and oscar going “missing” later the same day and everyone searching for him until nightfall; jaune proposes stealing an airship that night, and they execute their plan the following day, depart from argus in the afternoon, and reach atlas that night. this puts the ending of V6 somewhere around the second or third week of september.

now. V7 is… tricky. there are two time skips of indeterminate but significant length (between 7.2 and 7.3, and during the montage in 7.5), the action is divorced from the academic calendar altogether, the one major event that could serve as a temporal marker—the election—is left temporally ambiguous, and because atlas is polar we can’t gauge the passage of time by changes in the weather. however!!

remnant has earthlike seasons, ergo the planet’s axis likely has an earthlike obliquity, ergo atlas—being just barely inside the polar circle—must experience midnight sun and polar twilight phenomena during the summers and winters respectively. V7 begins in late september, when the days and nights should be of roughly equal length.

and, here’s where this gets fun: 7.7 seems to cover a decent chunk of time. it begins long enough after the election for the massacre to mature into the news cycle, calls for penny to be taken offline to gather momentum, robyn’s vigilanteism to “embolden” suppliers in mantle to refuse to do business with the atlesian government, and jacques to get the other two council members on board with impeaching ironwood; so, it’s been anywhere from a few days to a week or two. most of the episode takes place at night (or indoors in windowless areas), with a single daylight scene in ironwood’s office in the first part of the episode. pietro also offers one of the very few hard temporal markers in the volume, stating that maria has been helping him for “the past few weeks”—however, it’s not clear whether he means the past few weeks since the election, or if he’s talking about having been running on fumes in the weeks leading up to the election and the new situation with penny is just one more overwhelming thing. personally, i lean toward the former reading, since it squares with the other subtle signals that it’s been some time since the night of the election, but both are equally plausible. anyway—after 7.7, there are no daylight scenes until the sun rises at the end of 7.13. granted, the reason for this is that 7.8-7.13 are all contiguous, beginning on the evening of jacques’s dinner part and lasting through the entire night, BUT.

you see the pattern here, yeah?

the first five episodes of V7 have mostly, by a wide margin, daylight scenes. 7.6 begins in the morning, but most of it occurs during or after sundown. then there’s a modest time skip with one gloomy daytime scene, and the rest of the volume plays out in the dark. there is obviously a lot of symbolic mileage to be gotten here, but in the absence of any concrete temporal markers we can also take this shift from day to night as a rough approximation for the dwindling of days toward the polar twilight of the atlesian winter, and the sunrise at the end of the volume as a signal that we haven’t quite reached the winter solstice yet.

so: V7 begins around the third week of september and likely ends in the first or second week of december, just a couple weeks shy of the solstice. the first time skip (between 7.2 and 7.3) is probably somewhere around a week, tops; the montage time skip in 7.5 would then begin in early october and last until mid-november (at which time daylight hours would be around 6 depending on atlas’s exact latitude). if the election itself occurs within the next few days, and 7.7 picks up a few weeks after the election, that puts 7.7 roughly in the first week of december (daylight hours approximately 4) and 7.8 a day or two after that at most, and possibly the evening of the same day.

V8 explicitly takes place in about 48 hours. but, after using the presence of daylight to approximate a hard timeline for V7, it would be remiss of me not to discuss daylight in V8 soooo,

based on the estimate of V7 ending in early december, there should be only about four hours of daylight per day in V8. 8.1 begins no more than an hour or so after 7.13—the whole episode occurs in full (if overcast) daylight, so it must occur within the approximately three hour long window between dawn and dusk; which is to say, those kids moved FAST! breaking into the atlesian military complex a mere hour or two after catching their breath and regrouping. 8.2, 8.3, and 8.4 are contiguous, with sunset occurring in 8.4, meaning that approximately four hours elapse between the end of 7.13 and the end of 8.4.

8.5 begins after dark, and during ruby’s broadcast it’s shown to be sunset in vacuo, WHICH MEANS that we can pinpoint the time of the global broadcast fairly precisely—because we know, from the world clocks in V2, that atlas is in a time zone six hours ahead of vacuo. using the equatorial line marked on the map above, we can estimate vacuo’s latitude as roughly 40N, and we’ve worked out that it’s the first or second week of december. therefore sunset in vacuo occurs around 4:30 PM, vacuo time, making it 10:30 PM in atlas when ruby’s message is broadcast at the end of 8.5. :)

next up is 8.6, the present-day portion of which begins at sunrise the following day—around 11 o’clock in the morning and about 24 hours after the end of 7.13. 8.7 begins at dawn (late morning) and lasts until after dark (with sunset around 3:20 PM). it’s not clear how long after dark, so 8.7 might be last as little as six hours or as long as twenty. 8.8 seems to begin no more than ten or fifteen minutes after 8.7—the amount of time it takes klein to get started treating nora and for rwb to lift penny out of her crater and bring her to klein—and realistically only lasts around half an hour to forty-five minutes. 8.9 begins most likely around the time 8.8 ends—it jumps forward from jyr leaving the ship in 8.7 to them having made it into the whale—and lasts for most of the night (the sky becomes noticeably much lighter between the beginning and end of the episode, suggesting that jyr were inside monstra for quite a while; this would also explain why ren runs out of aura from masking and tracking them even with jaune amping him, he keeps it up for several hours straight.) 8.10 is contiguous with 8.9, and ironwood’s view of monstra at the beginning shows that sunrise is just barely beginning—the eastern horizon is tinged red—when oscar nukes the whale. so 8.9 ends and 8.10 begins around 11 o’clock, 48 hours after the end of 7.13. everyone in the immediate blast zone is knocked senseless for… probably around half an hour? as it’s fully dawn by the time we see the ace-ops picking themselves up. it then takes a few hours for jyre to hike to schnee manor from the outskirts of atlas, so they arrive at the very beginning of twilight, probably around 2 PM. 8.11-8.14 all take place inside the hour limit ironwood gives in 8.10; when atlas falls, the sun is setting around 3 PM, late in the afternoon, approximately 52 hours since salem arrived in atlas. (and: the refugees reach vacuo at 9 AM, vacuo time.)

and—because the vast majority of the action in this 52 hour period takes place in the dark, and because there are two separate episodes that begin at dawn and end at dusk or after dark despite covering events that should realistically only take a few hours—V8 seems to me to strongly support the early december almost-polar-twilight reading of V7’s dwindling daylight scenes.

and, putting it all together (using 80 as an arbitrary year number for the sake of clarity, and assuming that the calendar year begins in spring for the sake of tying it neatly with the academic calendar):

V1: mid-april to mid-august, 80.

V2: end of august through september, 80.

V3: first week of october, 80.

RNJR leave patch: mid-december, 80. ruby turns 16 during the time skip.

V4: mid-april through late july, 81.

V5: late july through august, 81.

V6: second or third week of september, 81.

V7.1-4: mid-september to early october, 81. it’s about one year since the fall of beacon by 7.4.

V7.5: early october through november, 81. ruby turns 17 during the montage.

V7.6-13: late november through first or second week of december, 81.

V8: about 52 hours in early december, 81.

it’s been approximately 20 months, in-universe, since the story began.

and, if that feels too short to you, it’s also plausible to interpret the 7.5 montage time skip as lasting through the winter solstice, in which case everything after the time skip occurs in mid-january, with 4-5 daylight hours and the days becoming gradually longer; which could conceivably push it to about 22 months if you put the end of V7 in early february. this isn’t my preference, though, because so much of the montage occurs in full daylight.

anyway here’s hoping for some concrete temporal markers in arrowfell so i can stop tinhatting about the proportions of daylight to nighttime scenes

#at some point i’m going to #do a rewatch specifically for the purpose of #trying to precisely date every episode #because i gotta #but not until arrowfell #which i’m really hoping will give me #a couple more crumbs to work with #re V7

193 notes · View notes

softquietsteadylove · 6 months

Note

Pleaseeeee we need more from the ghost file AU! It’s underrated and funny!

(as always, credit must be shared with @taran-chan who co-authored the first entry and shares custody of this AU with me)

"Hey, Thena?"

"Yes?"

"Why do I do this to myself?"

She smiled into her walkie-talkie. Gil was camping out upstairs while she was on the ground floor. He had initially said that he should be on the ground floor in case someone broke into the house. Then she said that the upper floor was likely more haunted and then he had fallen on that sword instead.

He was very protective, for a giant walking fraidy-cat.

"I wouldn't know the answer to that," she answered back, the click of the walkie's signal punctuating each sentence for her.

"Are you, um," he paused, and she heard the rustling of his sleeping bag. "Are you okay, down there?"

Ah, sweet Gilgamesh. Every hunt, she volunteered to come with him, and every hunt, he worried about her endlessly. She shifted in her own sleeping bag, "I'm fine Gil--are you?"

There was a bit of a silence on his end, because of course he was terrified. He hated doing solo investigations, even though that was always when he got his best evidence (when she wasn't there to corroborate the story).

"I know it's just an old house," he muttered, clearly sharing with her what he had been telling himself endlessly. "It makes...sounds."

"All old buildings do," she agreed, turning onto her back to stare up at the ceiling. Gil was up there, curled up on the carpet in the old bedroom of the woman who had died suddenly in full health on halloween night two hundred years earlier.

"The door's locked, right?"

"Yes," Thena laughed faintly, and he heard him grumbling about how lightly she took things on their hunts. "Gil, I'm safe."

"I just," he sighed and even clicked the walkie in the middle of his strenuous sentence. "I would feel a lot better if I could see you."

Thena shook her head on her pillow. Sweet, sweet Gilgamesh, with his charming words; and he wondered how she kept agreeing to late night ghost hunts with him. "I know, me too."

"What if-"

Thena looked at the walkie, but he never continued his statement. She clicked in, "Gil?"

"Ah, it's nothing."

She pursed her lips, sitting up now. It wasn't as if it wasn't creepy in the old, boarded up house she had broken them into for the night. But she didn't quite see things in the shadows and hear voices in the wind the way Gil did. "Gil?"

"It's okay, I'm sorry if I woke you up."

Thena reached for her phone and maglight, already shimmying out of her sleeping bag. "Do you want me to come up?"

She could practically imagine the look on his adorable face, lips all pouted and big brown eyes. He clicked in, "you don't have to."

"I'm coming up, Gil," she laughed, pulling her boots on again. "It's pretty late anyway. If you don't have much evidence by now I think the rest of the night will be quiet."

"Okay."

He sounded so excited.

Thena walked up the stairs, listening to every creek and moan. Gil was so expressive, always wearing his heart on his sleeve. She adored that about him. "Almost there."

She walked towards the first bedroom on the right, her feet creaking the floorboards. She knocked on the door, hearing a wobbly, "Thena?"

Gil was wrapped up in his sleeping bag, his flashlight on and pointed at the ceiling like a kid scared to go to sleep at camp. She shook her head, "what happened to lights off, hm?"

"Not tonight," he rustled around, emerging from the sleeping bag enough to look at her. He sighed, "you're a sight for sore eyes."

Thena rolled her eyes, "you're just saying that because you're scared that woman is going to appear at the foot of your sleeping bag."

"Well, I am now!"

She laughed as he unzipped the side of it and sat up properly, "I'm kidding Gil."

He pouted at her, holding the unzipped flap open, "just get in here."

Thena blushed. She had left her sleeping bag downstairs. She hadn't even thought about it--maybe she had just thought she would just come up and calm him down. Or maybe she imagined he would be so ready to leave that he would pack up and leave immediately.

"Come on," he urged, even moving the flashlight to beckon her closer. "It's chilly!"

Thena crept closer, tucking herself against his back at first to take off her boots again. "Gil, don't you-"

"Eep!"

A moan ran through the old house and that was all the excuse Gil needed to pull her into the sleeping bag with him, curling his arms around her and even tucking her smaller feet between his own.

"We've been in a lot of houses, but this one really takes the cake," he muttered against her hair, holding her against him like a full sized comfort toy.

Thena blinked, completely pressed into his chest as his hands rubbed circles in the back of her shirt. His sleeping bag was so much warmer than hers.

Gil settled himself more comfortably, finally turning the flashlight off and nestling his cheek against the top of her hair. "Okay, I'm beat. Wake me up if that ghost lady comes by."

"'Kay," Thena just barely managed to squeak out, and her voice was high and squeaky as she said, much to her own horror. She couldn't possibly sleep with her heart beating like this. It was the most adrenaline she'd had in her system all night.

"Hey," he whispered, and it was not helping her forget how close they were.

"Y-Yeah?" she whispered back, only because he couldn't see her face and how terribly flustered she felt.

"You know I couldn't do this without you, right?"

His arms tightened around her, and her hands gripped the back of his flannel in reflex. He was so warm, and he felt so strong, but also soft. Her eyes fluttered, "I know."

"Good," he sounded like he was smiling. He nuzzled her forehead until he could press his lips to it. "I just want you to know how happy I am that you're here."

Thena pressed herself even deeper into his chest, as if he and the ghosts could all see her falling even harder for him in real time. Her hands clung to him as she straightened out her curled spine, really cuddling against him. "I'm happy to be with you, too."

She heard him chuckle in the dark, and her blush intensified. That wasn't what he meant.

"Good," he sufficed to say. "Get some sleep."

She nodded against him, done trying to talk and formulate words with him saying such bone-meltingly sweet things. "Night."

#Thenamesh Ghost Files AU #Gil asks her if she's up for staking out this place for halloween night #thinking maybe she would rather go to a costume party or something #meanwhile Thena is like yes date night!#they do have some evidence to look at the next morning\#but Thena doesn't remember any of it #like not a spec #she's too busy thinking about how comfy it was to sleep together #all snuggled up like a couple of little love bugs #Gil is going through the tapes and asks if she remembers hearing this sound #Thena says no #because she could only hear her own heartbeat in her ears #and Gil's breathing #for hours #And Gil #poor sweet Gil #he has no idea why she seems to shy the next morning #they grab breakfast at some old dinner and when he brings her coffee she looks at him #like he's her prince charming #and he's like okay maybe last night wasn't so bad #Thena is here with heart eyes over spending the night together in a spooky old house #and listen honey same #happy spooky time!

12 notes · View notes