Fanfic / Not this time, Fate

Art by Sa-Dui

"When Jaune woke up back in his house with his sisters and family, all he could do was sigh. Every time he died he was forced to start over again, and this was what... the one thousandth time? More? If it doesn't matter how hard he tries, doesn't matter how much he fights. Then maybe it's time to just kick back and enjoy himself. Fate can find someone else to be its whipping boy."

— FanFiction.Net summary

A RWBY story by Coeur Al'Aran, Not this time, Fate is an unusual take on a Peggy Sue Fic. It focuses on Jaune, who after having died sometime after the events of Volume 3 got mentally sent back to the past and attempted to save himself and his friends from certain death... only to fail and try again. And then again. And then a couple hundred more times, all without success. Eventuallly, after yet another failure, he decides to kick back and take something of a vacation, choosing to spend some time with his family rather than make another, fruitless attempt at subverting fate. It... doesn't go according to the plan.

This story was Coeur's Breakthrough Hit - while One Good Turn Deserves Another was his first full story that received large attention, this fic pioneered the Groundhog Peggy Sue style within the fandom, led to a launching of stories with either identical or very similar premises, and threw the author to the top of RWBY's fanfiction authors, a position that he has maintained ever since.

Unlike the author's other stories, this one cannot be placed firmly on any side of Sliding Scale of Silliness vs. Seriousness. While the story has a lot of comedy, the circumstances give it a rather dark tone and it is often met with a harsh Mood Whiplash afterwards.

Can be read here on Fanfiction Dot Net.

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This work contains examples of:

A-F

• Actually Pretty Funny: Blake internally admits that while she sympathizes with Yang and definitely wouldn't want to have been in her place... seeing her get spanked like a bratty child by Jaune was still funny.
• Adaptational Badass: Cinder, both in terms of combat ability and in overall effectiveness. In canon Cinder is shown to struggle against opponents like Glynda or Pyrrha even with Maiden powers in play, and while her plan ultimately succeeds, it requires a lot of improvising on her part and is nearly foiled at multiple points. Here, Cinder is presented as a borderline Invincible Villain, whom Jaune cannot stop even with all the foreknowledge about her plans (she basically always reacts perfectly to his attempts to stop her) and who can utterly demolish Blake, Yang and half-maiden Weiss with just half of the Fall Maiden powers. Weiss theorises that this status can be at least partially attributed to Fate manipulating the events in Cinder's favor. It's also a massive case of Canon Marches On because at the time this was written, Salem hadn't been introduced yet, so Cinder really did seem to be the Big Bad.
• Adaptational Early Appearance: Jaune's actions in this loop pull Neo, Qrow and Winter into the spotlight earlier than their canon debuts in Volumes 2 and 3 respectively.
• Adaptational Villainy: Like in canon, Neo becomes single-mindedly obsessed with vengeance on one of the main cast for their role in Roman's death, but in this fic, she crosses a couple lines in pursuit of that vengeance that her canon self never crossed. Whereas the canon Neo only cared about killing Ruby and regarded any of her loved ones who got in the way as collateral damage, Neo in this fic actively targets and attempts to murder Jaune's family, including his heavily-pregnant mother, to get back at him.
• Afraid of Needles: Jaune finds himself with a crack in his unflappable demeanor after his experience this time around in Mountain Glenn. Roman and Neo, unable to beat the information they want out of him, resort to injecting him with drugs to make him compliant. This prospect is the first thing in ages that makes Jaune fear for himself, and it leaves an impression on him. Waking up in the infirmary after the ordeal, he instinctively panics when the doctor grabs a needle to give him medication.
• Agree to Disagree: Neither Jaune nor Weiss actually back down on the matter of the team's interference at the Paladin rally; they're both too self-assured and stubborn for that. What ends the argument is them each conceding that nobody handled the action or the aftermath as well as they should have, admitting fault, and apologizing for those things they regret in hindsight.
• Always Someone Better:
  • Even with his ridiculous amount of experience, Jaune is still an inferior fighter to Pyrrha, though when he's at his strongest it's primarily because of her Semblance that he has limited options against. After managing to beat her in a food-fight, he gets so excited at finally beating her at something that he lets his cover down for a moment.
  • Canon's super-smooth ladies' man Neptune is utterly blown away by Jaune's success with the opposite sex.
• And I Must Scream: Jaune concludes that, if his Aura malfunctions will continue in other lives, he will end up stuck in a short loop of painful deaths forever; without Aura, he can't survive Beacon's initiation, and if he can't even live past that, his loops will get shorter and shorter until he's seconds from death every loop and he'll spend eternity dying. Luckily, he fixes the problem before it comes down to this.
• And Then What?: Played for drama. After Jaune finally saves everyone and is free from his curse, he realizes he has no idea what to do with his life.
• Anger Born of Worry:
  • Jaune's rant at Blake when he rescues her from Torchwick at the docks is really this. While there is some truth to his takedown of her, his over-the-top rage ultimately stems from his fear for Blake.
  • Jaune is outright furious when Blake, Yang, and Weiss go off to assault a White Fang hideout behind his back. Part of it is this trope — even if their lives are just as expendable since they'll just reset if he dies, he still keeps the bad memories of it happening — and part of it is that they unwittingly work against his secret efforts to keep them safe.
• Are These Wires Important?: Jaune excuses how he deactivated an SDC droid to save Blake by blatantly lying about there being a convenient switch on the back. Judging by his state shortly after, what he actually did is violently jam his hand into the machinery and mess with the components, gashing his arm in the process.
• Asleep for Days: No less than four times Jaune ends up unconscious in hospital, each for over twenty-four hours, as a result of life-threatening ordeals.
• Asleep in Class: Jaune is well aware that Port's class is a consciousness-sapping time filler and conks out instantly on the very first day at Beacon. Weiss isn't willing to accept that and draws Port's attention to them. To get out of trouble, Jaune pulls out a story about having been on the periphery of a giant Grimm fight in the Emerald Forest (which he knows happened, even if he was lying about being there this time) which delayed his sleep. Port, who was actually fighting in said battle, loves the ego-stroking and lets him off.
• Badass Creed: As is usual for Coeur Al'Aran, the person unlocking Jaune's Aura puts their own spin on it.
  Nicolas Arc: For it is in our passing that we achieve immortality. By our example we become a martyr for the glory of others. Selfless in sacrifice, bound by duty, I release your soul... and by my hand... place this burden upon thee.
  • Near the end, when Jaune needs to unlock Sapphire's aura himself, he comes up with a Badass Creed that sums up his own life philosophy. It's... sort of grim, and immediately draws comment from those listening on how bleak it is.
    Jaune Arc: For it is in failure that we achieve immortality. Through this, we are bound to our task, an endless quest with no pause or rest. Cursed by duty and unbound by time, I release your soul, and by my hand... condemn thee.
• Badass Normal: Sapphire Arc is so hurt and frustrated by her powerlessness on the day of the Beowolf incident that she demands that her dad train her alongside Jaune, even if he won't unlock her aura, just so she never has to be useless like that again. At the Battle of Beacon she saves her mother and unborn sibling from Neo, holding her off for a crucial few seconds before help arrives.
• Bad Future: Though his friends' lives are most important to him, another reason Jaune isn't willing to let Cinder win is because the Fall of Beacon is just the first step in the villains' efforts to collapse the world into chaos and turmoil. When his partner Weiss suggests conceding defeat and letting Cinder have this one victory, Jaune isn't willing to sacrifice his home and one of his loved ones for anything, much less for the awful future he knows will come next.
• Bait-and-Switch Sentiment: While bantering with Cardin before his second spar, Jaune starts to wax theatrical about all the effort his partner Weiss put in, from dusk 'til dawn, to make him strong enough to win. He closes by proclaiming that "win" he shall... because being trained by her is such a nightmare that he never wants to do it again.
• Bar Brawl: Jaune and Yang get into one because his response to seeing a picture of Raven gives away that he knows her but refuses to tell Yang anything.
• Bare-Handed Blade Block: Jaune has such good Aura control (and so much of it, and such high pain tolerance) that he can pull this off with no issues. That is, until his Aura stops working. After he fixes it, he takes advantage by doing this to Adam's sword, grappling it so he can attack with his own blade in the other hand. It feels like he "put his hand in a blender", but he takes no flesh damage from this tactic.
• Because Destiny Says So: While there are no actual prophecies in the story, some events are repeated so often across the many loops that they can safely be assumed to be Fate's work. Upon learning the truth about Jaune's previous lives, Weiss concludes that the only way to break the cycle is to play along and let Cinder have her victory. She almost goes through with the plan, but changes her mind once she realizes that Jaune will never accept that kind of solution.
• Berserk Button: The first time Jaune's team sees him get worked up is when he joins Blake's and Weiss's argument about the White Fang, calling them scum. After watching them commit terrible crimes for subjective centuries and destroy Beacon more times than he can count with no sign of a peaceful counterpoint, he has no sympathy left for them.
• Better the Devil You Know: Jaune's earlier attempts to end the loops were basically to Try Everything, hoping that one magical action would be all that was needed to protect his friends' lives. But making big moves always caused the villains' plans to change, removing his main advantage — future knowledge — and ultimately ending in failure. Jaune's current plan is to keep his knowledge as useful as possible by not changing very many things, except for making himself strong enough to stop the villains when the time comes. He's just trying to get enough time to manage it.
• Beware the Silly Ones: How Jaune appears In-Universe. He puts on the appearance of being a lazy, unmotivated, dickish and mischievous sex maniac, but others catch on at varying rates to the facts that he's nowhere near as inept, unskilled or harmless as he pretends to be, and that anyone who threatens his teammates or family or pushes him to his mental breaking point should be very afraid, as he's capable of killing as easily as he breathes.
• Big Brother Worship: Amber Arc thinks her big brother is the nicest and coolest and strongest guy in the whole wide world. This eventually applies to all seven of his sisters, five of whom are older than him and one of whom helped raise him, because his unnatural maturity overshadows theirs and he comes across like a big brother despite being one of the youngest.
• Birds of a Feather: Coral Arc used to only tolerate Jaune, until the day of his current reset. His new personality as The Spock and a Loveable Sex Maniac got her to truly like him as they were so similar, and his messed up psychology let him be one of the only people who remotely understands her.
• Bittersweet Ending: Weiss manages to force Fate to end Jaune's loops forever, meaning that he finally gets the ending he always wanted: all of his friends and family survived the Fall of Beacon, Cinder and her allies are all dead, and he can finally move on with the life he always wanted. It then sinks in for Jaune that, without the loops giving him a purpose, he doesn't know what he's actually supposed to do with his life anymore, so while he may have finally ended the loops for good, he's ultimately left a shell of his original self with no sense of identity anymore. He's seventeen and is too psychologically tired to do anything else, and it's likely that only his friends will be able to keep him in some vague veneer of life - but at least he gets to live his final life with them, enjoy a meaningful romantic relationship for the first time in centuries with Weiss, grow old, and eventually die like he's wanted for so long.
• Black-and-Gray Morality: Jaune is not above getting his hands dirty in order to save his friends and is generally a bit of a prick. He still looks like a saint compared to Cinder.
• Blatant Lies:
  • In general, Jaune's attempts to justify why he knows and does the things he does are utterly unbelievable, and the only reason his friends and family let the matters go is because they don't have actual evidence to disprove his nonsense excuses.
  • Jaune saves Blake from an SDC droid on the train by deactivating it. She questions him how a random naked civilian could just turn off a battle robot, and he replies he just flicked the on/off switch on the back. It takes her the better part of a year to look back and realize how stupid a lie that is — at the time she barely questions it because she is more focused on combat, leaving her old life and partner behind, and trying desperately not to look at this blond stranger's junk.
  • The times when his friend group finds him unharmed and calm in the Emerald Forest, despite being chased by Grimm or a fight with Grimm having obviously occurred, his excuse is that the Grimm tripped over their own feet and died. Nobody believes him... except Ruby apparently. When they push him on the latter incident, he pulls out a story of him slaying a swarm of Grimm without breaking a sweat, which the others assume is this trope but is instead a Sarcastic Confession.
• Blood Knight: He doesn't let that show too often, but Jaune loves a good fight. He lists the sensation of a challenging battle as one of the few things that he still enjoys, even after having lived for centuries. And even though it's not a challenge, he loves going to town on minor Grimm because it's simple, uncontroversial, and makes him feel powerful after thousands of years of failure against superior fighters.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Possibly. Fate has put Jaune through hell for over a thousand years to fulfil a goal it cannot properly explain to Weiss. It is also a Deconstruction, as it has put Jaune through so much suffering that it is an evil entity in all ways that matter. The story makes it clear that Fate giving up completely on its goals is a good thing.
• Borrowed Catchphrase: Or catch... word, anyway. Jaune quotes Ruby's "nope" speech to Weiss, and muses that he's done so many times throughout the loops to help people in the same way Ruby helped him all those centuries ago. It's made such an impression on him that he habitually uses "nope" instead of "no" without realizing, which Blake finds a bit odd when the only others with the same habit are Ruby's immediate family.
• Breaking the Cycle of Bad Parenting: Here Jaune finally finds out the major reason his father never lets him train as a Huntsman despite being one himself. His family of Huntsmen inflicted Honor-Related Abuse on each generation, up to and including Offing the Offspring for the sake of their family's reputation, and he wants no part of that tradition anymore, nor for his children.
• Broken Ace: Jaune is extremely competent at many things. He can fight better than just about any student besides Pyrrha even while out of shape, has a wide array of skills and knowledge, and happens to be an excellent lover. But getting those abilities has done likely permanent damage to his psyche, because he learned them while trapped in a cycle of trauma and suffering, the likes of which no human being is built to endure.
• Broken Pedestal: Jaune once respected the likes of Ozpin and Ironwood implicitly, but not so now. In at least one previous loop, he tried to give them both information to stop Beacon from being attacked, only for Ironwood to order him incarcerated and tortured as an assumed enemy spy and Ozpin to express distaste but still allow it. He still considers them both to be genuinely heroic, but knows now that he will get precious little help from them beyond what they'd do anyway, and mostly treats them as well-meaning obstacles.
• Brought Down to Badass: Jaune gets hit by this when his aura stops working. While it is certainly a huge problem for him, Jaune still manages to go toe to toe with other Huntsmen in training like Weiss or Dew, and even defends himself against Neo for a moment.
• Bullying a Dragon: The Club couldn't handle Jaune even when he was piss-ass drunk, hallucinating, unarmed, and focused on fighting a third party. When he shows up again months later, they think it's a good idea to try to get payback for the property damage.
• Bumbling Dad: Team JBWY's dynamic is compared to a sitcom where Jaune is the lazy, foolish dad who represents a serious threat to his nagging wife Weiss's blood pressure.
• But for Me, It Was Tuesday:
  • While pretending to not remember Blake, Jaune keeps insisting she has to narrow things down.
  Blake: We met a little over a week ago.
  Jaune: You'll have to narrow that down.
  Blake: When you were with a woman?
  Jaune: You'll have to narrow that down.
  Blake: I saw you naked.
  Jaune: You'll... er... still have to narrow that down.
  Blake: I caught you having sex with a random woman on a train! And if you tell me you need me to narrow that down, I will throw you out that window!
  • Pyrrha first meets Jaune in this loop backstage at Weiss's last concert. They bumped into each other, and he took one look at her, refused to help her up, and ran away. To Jaune it is just another bullet in the veritable salvo that the universe is sending his way on that day, which would become more dire the next day, so he barely remembers it. But it turns out to have been eating at Pyrrha all the way up to the Vytal Festival, and she's just been too polite to bring it up until Jaune invites his circle of friends to ask him any questions they have.
• Canon Marches On: Cinder's depiction as an incredibly strong and smart Big Bad was a lot more plausible before Volume 4 introduced Salem and featured Cinder becoming weak.
• Can't Act Perverted Toward a Love Interest: Jaune makes himself a reputation as a shameless man-slut and skirt-chaser, but avoids seriously making a pass at any of his six main girl friends, which some of them privately consider to be strange, a blessing, and possibly a bit insulting even though he's such an asshole that they wouldn't go for it regardless. The truth is, he has slept with most of them, but he considers that period in his lives to be shameful and can't bring himself to jerk his friends' hearts around again, even knowing they won't remember it next loop.
• Cassandra Truth: No attempt Jaune has ever made to tell others about his circumstances has ever been successful. At best they simply don't believe him, and at worst they have assumed his special knowledge to be proof he's an enemy spy. Indeed, when he finally is stressed and desperate enough to tell his friends in this loop, they all assume he's just talking about horrible recurring nightmares. Only Weiss starts to believe him when he tells her separately, because he knows about the Fall Maiden and described the ambush that felled her, and Weiss knows from the Maiden's memories that he was not there to see it.
• Chewbacca Defense: Jaune becomes notorious among his circle for not giving a straight answer about anything they confront him about. Instead of addressing their arguments in good faith, he deflects, uses blatant-but-unfalsifiable lies they can't technically disprove, or distracts them with audacious tangents to get them off the topic. The fact is, he has no straight answers to give them, and this is the only option he has.
• The Chosen One: Invoked. It is clear that Fate wants Jaune to do something important and likely related to Salem's plans, but the details are unclear. The reason that the loops are even occurring are that Fate considers him dying before his destiny to be unacceptable, and wants a timeline where he lives and Beacon falls; Jaune committed suicide shortly after Pyrrha died in the original timeline.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: Jaune recalls suffering this multiple times. Cinder, Ironwood and the White Fang have all inflicted some manner of torture on Jaune during his past lives and Roman Torchwick does so in the current loop.
• Combat Breakdown: After Roman beats Blake and Sun in the canon spectacular 'martial arts, guns, and superpowers' fight on the docks, he's interrupted by Jaune. The battle very quickly takes a turn for the savage, as Jaune won't allow him the opportunity for fancy moves or even to use his weapon's Dust cannon. By the end both of them are reduced to grappling on the concrete, beating each other with fists, slamming skulls against the ground, and trying to gouge out eyes.
• Combat Pragmatist:
  • Both Jaune and Roman fight with the intent of causing as much damage and pain as possible. Roman notes during their fight on the docks that Jaune is clearly fighting to kill rather than disable or disarm like most students would.
  • During his spars in Glynda's class, Jaune will use distractions, tasers, and the environment to fight off someone. After he steals a Bullhead to save Blake, Glynda preemptively adds military aircraft to the list of things not allowed in spars.
• Comedic Spanking: Jaune once spanks his daughter for misbehaving. The comedy comes from the fact that said "daughter" is Yang, someone the same age as him, she is just joking about him doing it, he does it without batting an eye, he does it like a real parent and not a womanizer, it sends the rest of the team into Stunned Silence, and she's prepared to flatten his ribcage for it.
• Commonality Connection: Defied. Coral tries to make friends with Blake based on their shared taste in dirty literature. Blake isn't having it.
• Compensating for Something: Jaune insinuates this about Adam's sword, in an audacious attempt to piss the guy off, both times they meet in this loop.
  Jaune: Don't worry though, I'm sure when the lights are off some women might mistake it for the real thing.
• Consummate Liar: Subverted with Jaune. He has to tell tons of lies to explain his incomprehensible behavior and inexplicable skills, and mostly gets away with them... but he's not nearly as good a liar as he thinks he is. His strength isn't deception, it's stubbornness. His friends and family are aware that he's lying to their faces about a lot of things, because his explanations are unbelievable, but let the matters go because it's a waste of time trying to get him to come clean and things usually work out.
• Cosmic Plaything: As the title suggests, Jaune has an... unhealthy relationship with Fate. Being stuck in a seemingly endless loop of failure for multiple centuries is not a sign of good luck.
• Cover Innocent Eyes and Ears: Yang's immediate response to their whole friend group walking in on Jaune and Beacon's doctor having sex in the infirmary is to protect Ruby from the sight. She's a bit surprised to find that Pyrrha beat her to it, but either way it is too late to stop her from seeing too much.
• Crazy-Prepared: Centuries of repeating the same events has let Jaune become prepared for most things that could possibly happen. From other peoples' perspective, he prepares for things in ways that should be impossible to do or hope to predict. In spite of this apparent (and basically legitimate) precognition, it still hasn't been enough to convince anyone he's a time traveler.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • Jaune remembers having experienced a literal example, when he decided to fight the Grimm Dragon on his own, with rather predictable results.
  • Jaune shows how far he's come as a fighter, even while in poor shape, when he single-handedly kills the Deathstalker in Initiation. The giant beast needed eventual Team JNPR to work together to slay in canon, but now he can effortlessly dance around it and hack it apart, even engaging in Casual Danger Dialogue.
  • Thanks to an impulsive interference by Jaune, Cinder decides to participate in a spar herself rather than having Mercury do it, something which Jaune hasn't seen before. Weiss, her chosen opponent, predictably gets thrashed, Cinder blocking and dodging all her strikes with ease until she sees an opening, after which she instantly takes control and wins the match in five hits.
• Cursed with Awesome: Unlike Pyrrha, who Jaune says always handles the Maiden merger like a champ, Weiss suffers very clear identity lapses immediately after waking from the procedure, some of her own memories having been replaced by Amber's. It causes her some angst and uncertainty, but turns out to be a blessing in disguise. The power going to the imperfectly-suitable Weiss not only lets Jaune finally gain a real ally, but also one with the means to challenge Fate at its own game.
• Cut Himself Shaving: Yang is in the middle of threatening Team CRDL for throwing sap at Jaune and getting him attacked by Rapier Wasps when they admit it is actually meant for her. After beating the hell out of them for trying to get purple sap in her hair, Yang loudly declares that it's a good thing she killed the Ursa that attacked them, who left them with all these injuries.
• Darker and Edgier: While it's not a full-fledged Dark Fic, Not this time, Fate is significantly darker than the original show. Mature themes such as depression or post-traumatic stress are explored at length, sexual intercourse is referenced numerous times, brutality is more pronounced and the tone is overall much bleaker.
• Death by Adaptation: The Battle of Beacon has all the present villains die. Emerald and Mercury are victims of Yang's 'one save' from Raven. Neo is killed in a suicidally reckless revenge attempt on Jaune's family. Adam is mutually stabbed by Jaune thanks to Fate's intervention. Cinder dies at the top of Beacon fighting against Weiss, Yang and Blake. Even the Grimm Dragon is felled instead of petrified.
• Death Is Cheap: Half the reason Jaune can kill without hesitation or guilt is because most of the impact of death is negated when you know it will simply be reversed. He feels no remorse for his brutal slayings because nobody he kills ever stays dead, or even remembers it. This includes his own death — he no longer fears it because it has no finality for him.
• Death Is Dramatic: Played straight, and then Subverted, with Cinder. As the Big Bad of the story, she is killed in an epic confrontation that climaxes with Weiss creating an ice copy of Jaune's weapon rather than her own, and she gets a dying speech as she lays bleeding out. Unfortunately, all that drama takes too long and Jaune dies. When Fate gives Weiss another chance, she preempts the epic climax by just stabbing Cinder with her normal weapon, then instantly runs off without listening to her dying words.
• Decapitated Army: Subverted. While Cinder is extremely dangerous, she is not actually invincible, and Jaune has in some loops succeeded in killing her, though never in direct combat. But doing so has never achieved the results Jaune wants, since Cinder is only a single part of a criminal conspiracy, and the groundwork for her evil plan is always laid out long before she enters Jaune's life. It's not enough to kill the ringleader to keep his friends alive, he also has to tangle with her network of associates who will finish what she started in the event of her death, killing some of his friends in the process as per usual. In fact, the reason why he doesn't just bomb Cinder's dorm is because the one time he tried that, Adam was let off the leash and proceeded to launch an attack on Vale that killed even more people than the Fall of Beacon, so it's actually better to keep her alive.
• Deconstruction Fic: Of a Peggy Sue formula. The author goes to great lengths to establish just how hard "fixing" the story would be even with time travel, while also calling into question the morality of playing with timelines for the sake of saving a few specific people.
• Deliberate Injury Gambit: Jaune is forced to employ one against a Beowolf to compensate for not having a weapon or Aura. He goads it into slashing open a steam pipe, then holds his hand against the scalding jet to direct it into the beast's eyes. He then tears the same pipe out of the wall to use as a bludgeon, despite how holding it sears his hand.
• Demoted to Extra:
  • Ruby, even moreso than in author's other stories. Not only is Jaune made into the protagonist, Ruby isn't even a part of the story's main team and doesn't take part in events like the docks battle or the Breach (other than being part of The Cavalry). Her role in the narrative is mostly limited to making a few fruitless attempts at getting Jaune to open up, some comedy, and leading the fight against the Grimm Dragon, which largely happens off-screen anyway. However, in keeping with her general characterization as The Paragon, she does at one point provide Jaune with exactly the words he needs to hear to summon his Heroic Second Wind and resolve to make this loop the last.
  • Pyrrha. While she was something of a side character in the show, she still had an important role in the plot, especially regarding Jaune's development. Here, Pyrrha is effectively written out of the story with Weiss taking over her original role and focus. She does, however, play an important part in the backstory, as her death was directly responsible for starting the cycle of repeats.
  • Penny gets the worst of it, as she is all but Adapted Out. She appears very briefly, doesn't interact with the main characters in any meaningful way and her ultimate fate isn't addressed, although it can be assumed she survived the events of the story, as Cinder's plan didn't rely on her death this time around.
• Designated Girl Fight: The Final Battle ends up like this, with Jaune (backed up by Sun and Neptune) taking on Adam while the rest of his team fight Cinder. This is justified, though. Jaune can't survive against Cinder even at his strongest, and he's all but convinced that Fate is responsible for that. His team doesn't have destiny itself working against them, so he thinks they might pull it off. Meanwhile, he has better odds surviving against Adam, if not necessarily winning — and he's right, as Fate has to briefly break reality to kill Jaune when his plan is about to succeed.
• Despair Event Horizon: Jaune's original incarnation has crossed this after Pyrrha's death, leading to his first death as he allowed himself to be killed by a pack of Grimm.
• Determinator: Jaune doesn't hope to save his friends and stop Cinder. He knows it will happen, even if it takes him another thousand years. Weiss predicts that Jaune is more likely to go insane from constant failures than to ever give up.
• Determined Defeatist: As mentioned above, having little to no chance of success doesn't stop Jaune from trying his damnedest to save his friends.
• Deuteragonist: Weiss, especially in the second half of the story due to her becoming a Love Interest to Jaune and being offered the Fall Maiden power. She even gets to take out the Big Bad during the finale.
• Diabolus ex Machina: In-Universe example. After Weiss kills Cinder, Fate - which in this story is an actual entity hellbent on screwing Jaune over - intervenes by moving Adam's sword straight into Jaune's chest. Weiss still manages to make things right though through some time manipulation.
• Diabolus ex Nihilo: A major source of frustration for Jaune is that even after all this time, he still hasn't figured out hardly anything about Cinder prior to the events in Vale. He knows that she will assassinate the Fall Maiden, but as far as he can tell she effectively appears out of nowhere to do that, leaving no indication of where she came from or what she's done before. This is a problem because by the time she reveals herself, the evil plans she set up can't be fully stopped even by killing her. If he could find her earlier, he could take her out before she's finished preparing, but he can't.
• Didn't Think This Through
  • While in the middle of trying to fend off a berserk Jaune, Torchwick muses that it probably isn't the smartest idea to take the known merciless psychopath killer and pump him full of drugs. He could have at least tied him back up, instead of betting on the overdose keeping him down and out.
  • Weiss sets up a date with Jaune, but her first idea of the best date is the most bougie and expensive restaurant she could manage to book on short notice. She admits once they're there that it's the kind of place that describes their food in opaque Purple Prose so that anyone too poor to eat there couldn't make heads or tails of the menu anyway. Jaune instantly feels like an unwelcome outsider trespassing where he doesn't belong, which starts the night off terribly.
• Did You Just Scam Cthulhu?: In something of an Exaggerated Trope, Weiss manages to trick Fate itself into giving her another shot at saving Jaune. The ruse itself doesn't really help her much, but it lets her prove a point - humans, and by extension Jaune, will always fight against their destiny. This convinces Fate to finally give up on achieving the desired result and give the heroes a shot at the happy ending they deserve.
• Died in Your Arms Tonight: After the first time around, when he was sent away from the battle, Jaune always tried to reach the top of Beacon's tower to save Pyrrha from Cinder. Most of the time, this was the result, and after so many times he now gets to relive the scenario regularly in his dreams. The night after Weiss asks him to let her die, the nightmare changes to include her instead.
• Dies Differently in Adaptation: Roman Torchwick doesn't make it to the Battle of Beacon this time around. After the Breach, Jaune executes him while still in his drug-induced berserker haze. This change winds up helping in the end — Roman isn't in custody on Atlas's main battleship, and isn't busted out to compromise their network.
• Don't You Dare Pity Me!: A character flaw of Blake's that Jaune notices over time is that she has trouble trusting or accepting charity from people. Conversely, if someone offers her something in exchange for something from her, she's more likely to accept it. Blake turns down the offer to stay with the Arc family for the school break instead of working a crappy job for a crappy apartment, up until Jaune suggests she could do his homework to pay him back.
• Do Wrong, Right: After his spar with Sun, Weiss gets after Jaune for the dirty trick he used to win... because he didn't have one prepared in advance, and had to improvise one, so he's clearly off his game. Jaune doesn't know how to respond to this.
• Dramatic Irony:
  • Though Jaune has a lot of knowledge, there're still some things we the audience know from watching the series that he hasn't managed to learn. Despite spending some loops working for the villains, he only vaguely knows that there's someone above Cinder in rank and doesn't know the name or nature of Salem. He also never got a conversation with Qrow that reveals his passive bad luck Semblance, which causes him some unexplained annoyances when they're nearby each other.
  • Jaune's behavior confounds his friends and family, and their attempts to make sense of him are a veritable Kudzu Plot (from their perspective) that spans the length of the story. Every time they think they're making headway it just leaves them with a dead end and more questions. The reader also has Jaune's perspective on most things, so they can see when their theories are on the right track or totally off-base.
• The Dreaded:
  • Jaune ends up making himself a bit of a reputation... not just as someone with a revolving bedroom door, but as someone who absolutely can and will kill you if you push him. Cardin and the mobsters who run The Club invite his wrath, and when he delivers said wrath it leaves them so scared shitless they outright exit the story out of fear. Jaune's friends are only barely exposed to this side of him that commands terror.
  • On a lighter note, by the second semester, nobody at Beacon wants to spar with Jaune in combat class, because they don't want to be the unfortunate guinea pig for his latest painful and humiliating stratagem.
• Dreadful Musician: Jaune has spent some time actually practicing the guitar this loop after neglecting it since his original life, so he should theoretically be decent, but he barely bothers. Mostly he goes out of his way to play the loudest and worst guitar anyone has ever heard, the first time to make himself a pariah and the second to break some tension. His friends describe his musical skill as 'an ability' only because as Huntsmen-in-Training they have a healthy respect for weaponry.
• Driven to Suicide: Jaune mentions killing himself in some of the failed timelines, though he obviously knew that he would just wake up in his bed afterwards. Unlike in the original timeline, where Jaune effectively committed suicide due to his grief over Pyrrha's death, prompting Fate to start the cycle of repeats because it wants him to live past that point.
• Dumbass Has a Point: Jaune's infamous strategies when sparring in Beacon's first semester are a piss take on the combat lessons and deliberate attempt to give Miss Goodwitch grey hairs... but they also happen to be legitimate tactics, and he wins all his completed matches, so he gets high marks for them. Third in his year in fact, behind Yang (barely) and Pyrrha.
• Dying Declaration of Hate: It seems to be Jaune's custom to use his last words in a given life to spite his killer, be it Cinder or someone else.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Both regarding the fic itself and the author's work as a whole. Coeur generally avoids using original characters (with a few recurring exceptions), and even more so avoids using original Beacon students unless he has an important reason to (see The Beast of Beacon). In an early chapter of this fic, however, is a rare instance of a Spear Carrier student: his last name is Brown, he is the leader of a Team Terracotta, and he wields a polearm. His only act in the story is to get stomped by Ruby on the first day of sparring class, defying Weiss's expectations. He is never described as appearing again, nor are any similar bit characters, and Coeur would take pains in future fics to avoid giving minor background students even that small amount of characterization unless necessary.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: And definitely not easily. Jaune has been putting himself through hell for centuries on end in order to create what he views as a perfect ending. While he eventually succeeds, he struggles with finding the will to live after all that's happened, arguably making it into a Deconstruction.
• Entertainingly Wrong: Everyone, really, because only Jaune knows what's going on, but Weiss especially is arrogant enough to actively make assumptions with total confidence.
  • Unlike some people, Weiss has no questions at first about why Jaune, who only days ago told her he wanted to pursue a music career, is suddenly enrolled in Beacon. That's because she instantly assumes that he is so inspired by her example (a former singer becoming a Huntress) that he decides to drop those plans and follow in her footsteps, because who wouldn't want to be as great and noble as Weiss Schnee? It doesn't take her long to see how wrong she is...
  • While Blake is shocked that the authorities are finally paying attention to the White Fang, Weiss points out that their earlier ignoring the terrorists was probably them secretly gathering intel for this sting, since there's no way such an operation could happen without a lot of preparation. Jaune is amused because he knows the truth is the exact opposite: that there was no plan, but rather the world's least-professional professional Huntsman conducted a one-man raid in the spur of the moment after receiving an inexplicable tipoff out of nowhere.
  • Every time Weiss uses her sister Winter sleeping with Jaune as shorthand for an impossible event, Jaune gets some silent amusement knowing that he has actually done that once (his smugness being dampened when he remembers the circumstances).
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • Jaune has basically no shame about his sexual habits (and if the stories are to be believed he's okay with some really freaky shit), but the incest kink is right out. Making jokes alluding to it is the main way Coral can out-pervert him, and he considers suicide to avoid listening to his parents have sex one room over. He's also shown to be okay with a certain amount of pain play, but Beacon's doctor Tsune is still too much for him except in small doses.
  • Played for Laughs. As broken as Jaune is psychologically, and as resistant as he is to embarrassment... even he doubts that he could literally walk into Ozpin's office and take a shit on his desk to try and get expelled.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Fate cannot understand why Jaune has been doing what he does for as long as he has. It has been trying to get him to play along with its intended plan for centuries, to give up and accept the timeline as it's supposed to happen. It brings Weiss to itself because it's scared that the current course is unsustainable, but can't figure out an alternative. Weiss tells Fate that its plan will never happen, because it relies on Jaune settling for an imperfect ending for his friends, which he'd sooner lose his mind than do.
• Exact Words: On the first day of class, Weiss strongarms Jaune into getting ready for the day, demanding that he change out of his sleepwear and into his uniform immediately. Cut to him sitting down in class with a burning hand print on his face, complaining that he was punished for doing what he was told.
• Expecting Someone Taller: After hearing Yang got into a bar fight and didn't win, Ruby pictured some kind of giant, muscled monster-man as her opponent. She's a bit shocked when she's told it was Jaune, who's pretty tall but also scrawny and unassuming.
• Failed a Spot Check: Blake pointedly does not look at Jaune anywhere but his face when they first meet, as he is in his birthday suit at the time. That's the only logical explanation for how she misses his massive, disfiguring set of scars that span the entire front of his midsection.
• Failure Hero: And how! Everything Jaune has done for as long as he can remember has ended in failure, and he fails a lot of things this time around as well. Even at the final hour, Fate itself artificially forces failure on him when he is about to succeed. He manages to make one ally who could bail him out, however.
• Failure Is the Only Option: If Jaune was to succeed in staying out things and abandoning his friends, the story would have to center around him relaxing with his family while all the other cast members die offscreen. It is therefore no surprise that all his attempts at getting expelled from Beacon fail.
• Faint in Shock: Jaune reacts to learning that his mother is having another kid by quietly freaking out and then passing out standing up. His friends and family think he's being a bit dramatic considering he already has younger sisters, but they don't know the real reason. Jaune knows what's coming in a matter of months, and has just realized that if he screws up in this life, then he'll permanently lose the chance to meet his new sibling, even though he resets.
• Fanservice with a Smile: While Beacon is out after the first semester, Jaune's sister Coral drags him to a sexy maid café. And his server is Blake, much to Jaune's surprise and her own mortification. It's implied that she takes a job there in every loop to afford lodging with Beacon closed, and for lack of other jobs that offer such brief employment and/or accept faunus.
  Blake: Apparently a lot of girls decide at the last minute that it's not for them.
  Sapphire: I can see why...
• Fantasy-Forbidding Father: The entire Arc family was like this. All members were forbidden to do much of anything not related to becoming a Huntsman to maintain the family's honor. They were all trained to become Huntsmen, could only date or marry other Huntsmen, and could only play games dealing with skills that applied to Huntsmen. After disowning the family, Nicholas himself became a strange Inversion — his kids are free to do anything they want and pursue their passions... except take up the 'family business' to 'uphold honor'. That's a hard no.
• Financial Abuse: As always, Jacques Schnee freezes Weiss's accounts during the Vytal Festival so she'll stop avoiding his correspondence to get them back. Jaune, knowing this will happen, uses Weiss's bank information to open an independent account in her name and transfer a lot of her funds before her father can lock them down.
• The Fog of Ages: Having lived a thousand years or more, Jaune has started to find it difficult to remember specific things that happened in any of his past lives. His memory is mostly filled with skills, important facts and dates, and strategies he's tried before. It's mentioned that it's sometimes tripped him up in the past, forgetting exactly what he is and isn't supposed to know, and what has and hasn't happened, in a given loop.
• Forced to Watch: As seen in one of Jaune's nightmares, one loop ended with Jaune captured by the White Fang, beaten nearly to death, and made to watch Blake be executed by Adam right in front of him, after she refused to kill him herself to spare her own life.
• Forgot About His Powers: Nicolas Arc has been shown capable of activating another person's aura, even in a critical situation. Yet when his own daughter bleeds out right next to him, he just stands there dumbfounded, not bothering to do anything.
• Forgot Their Own Birthday: By the beginning of the story, Jaune's spent so long away from the people who know his birthday that he simply doesn't remember it at all. Whenever his friends ask him, he dodges the question. Their enrollment at Beacon doesn't last a full year, being invariably interrupted by Cinder, and after that point they're beyond caring about birthdays. He's shocked to find that his birthday is the very next day after his latest reset, when his family throws him a surprise party.
• Forgotten First Meeting: Sun and Neptune meet Jaune a year or two before Beacon in this loop, at a resort in Vacuo, but neither remembers him by the time they arrive at Beacon for the second semester and meet him again. He instantly recognizes them as two of his most reliable allies in the future, but they don't manage to connect him with the nondescript blond boy who stopped them from ogling some girls on a beach that one time.
• Foreshadowing: Jaune's victory over Pyrrha in the food fight is this. This is something that has never happened in any previous loop; every time Jaune becomes involved in the food fight, he loses. The fact that he wins this time is an indication that his efforts are not as hopeless as they appear and that Fate is losing control of the chain of events.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: For most of the first semester, Jaune has his normal circle of classmates that hang around him, but none of them especially like him as a person. Ren and Nora met him years earlier and are disappointed at how much more of an asshole he's become since then, Yang goes easy on him because she knows he's at Beacon against his will because of her, Ruby just wants everybody to get along and be happy, and those are his most positive relationships. Before long, though, he loses his nerve and lets his asshole behavior slip enough to build real friendship.
• Full-Frontal Assault: Jaune comes close to doing this when Adam is poised to blow up the train his family is on, while he happens to be nude. Luckily, Blake has her change of heart then, and the most he has to do is deactivate a single droid before she decouples the carriage with the bomb from the rest.
• Fuzz Therapy: Zwei is eventually revealed to be a deliberate invocation of this trope. The Xiao-Long-Rose household got him as part of an effort to help Taiyang out of his depression after Summer's death. He's a therapy dog specializing in Huntsmen, and is trained to recognize troubled people and give them affection. Tai suggests sending Zwei to Beacon to see how he reacts to Jaune, and his teammates see the dog practically attach to him and don't like what that implies.

G-L

• Generation Xerox: It only really applies to this current loop, but the given backstory of the Arc family states that Jaune's father Nicholas was also all-but-forced to enroll in Beacon. In Nicholas's case it was for lack of any other career prospects that would easily get him away from his parents, whom he had just fallen out with, in spite of him souring on the idea of becoming a Huntsman by then.
• Genre Deconstruction: A lot of the common assumptions and contrivances seen in similar Peggy Sue stories are deliberately examined and tested logically.
  • After dying for the first time, Jaune knows about the villains' Evil Plan, so stopping them should be fairly easy right? Wrong. He can't just give all his information to Ozpin or other authority figure, as each time they either dismiss him or take him for an enemy spy ^note  as the author's notes put it, a random stranger knowing sensitive information in a shadow war absolutely looks like an enemy spy, and would of course prompt Ozpin and Ironwood to "plug the leak". He can't stop Cinder's faction on his own either - even with all the foreknowledge and the support of his friends, he is simply not strong enough to take down the entire terrorist organization, at least before they inflict irreparable damage and doom his loved ones either way; in the few cases where he does make a dent in their operation, they have backup plans that he can't predict. He is therefore forced to try out new and intricate plans in order to hinder his enemies, only to fail at the end each and every single time.
  • A big flaw in Jaune's future knowledge is that it becomes increasingly useless the more he uses it. His enemies are people with brains, so if he goes gallivanting around messing up their plans willy-nilly then the villains will notice, and change their plans in response. Then he's back to working blind; worse, those enemies now know that somebody is gunning for them and will likely discover it's him. By the present Jaune has given up making giant changes because it's Better the Devil You Know.
    • This ties into a broader deconstruction of the tendency to give only the Peggy Sue character real agency; realistically, the other characters have just as much agency if less foreknowledge and can make equally consequential decisions. The most triumphant example of this is the fact that, though Jaune is still instrumental in laying the groundwork, knowingly and unknowingly, for this to happen, it is Weiss, The Deuteragonist, that ultimately defeats Fate.
  • You'd think that, with centuries of experience under his belt, Jaune would be some sort of unstoppable badass... until you realize that skill alone doesn't really mean that much. Despite Jaune being arguably more skilled than any of his classmates, their superior physique, weaponry and Semblances enable them to hold their own against him and, in case of Pyrrha, utterly outclass him even still. And that's not even getting to the villains. His skill and experience let him punch above his weight class, but there's only so much they can do against an opponent that is physically superior to him in every way.
    • A bigger problem is that thanks to the nature of the loops, only Jaune's mind is sent back. His body doesn't get altered in the slightest, meaning that each and every time, if he wants to fight, he has to learn it all again from step one. He also starts every loop in the body of a seventeen year old teenager who has not taken his training seriously for most of his life, when basically every Huntsman candidate starts seriously training in childhood. No matter how much training he can fit in before Beacon, he is simply outmatched by anyone of Huntsman-caliber in terms of conditioning and physique.
  • Having lived through the same events over and over again means that Jaune can usually prepare for them and deal with them better than he would otherwise... but it also means that, when something different happens, he is left woefully unprepared and may even unwittingly make things worse than originally. It nearly costs Blake's life at one point, since he's forgotten to make a normally reliable event (Penny meeting Ruby) occur in this loop; he even blows past Penny earlier in the same day and doesn't realize his mistake until Blake is minutes from death.
  • Another trope scrutinized is the genre's implicit assumption of an indeterminist universe and thus the primacy of free will. What happens, as Jaune discovers, if the universe is, at least to some degree, deterministic?
• A Glass in the Hand: While Jaune generally has really good composure, his body betrays him in response to really important things.
  • When Yang asks him about Raven at The Club after getting nowhere with Junior, the glass of water he was nursing almost shatters. Predictably, she sees right through his denial that he's seen her before.
  • At his first counseling session with Doctor Oobleck, he shows no reaction to the idea of his own death, but at the idea of Blake's death he almost crushes the handle of his mug.
• Goal in Life: Jaune first entered Beacon to satisfy a vague and naive idea of being worth something as a hero. Now he wants to do one thing and one thing only: take down the villains before they can kill any of his friends. He's been at it so long that that one objective has practically consumed his mind, and he doesn't know if he has it in him to pursue much of anything else once he finally completes it.
• God Test: Out of all of his friends in the final loop, the only one Jaune is able to convince of his time looping is Weiss. He does so by utilizing her Maiden memories, accurately describing the ambush that got Amber mortally wounded even though Weiss knows for a fact that he didn't see it happen.
• Go, Ye Heroes, Go and Die: Weiss's attempt to boost Jaune's morale before his second spar with Cardin goes over so bad that Jaune tries to use it as an excuse to abstain, because it's not fair that he has to fight so soon after hearing that.
• Graceful Loser: Despite being tricked and foiled, Fate doesn't bear any ill will towards the heroes. It even manipulates the events to save Jaune, even though it would be just as easy for it to let him die for real.
• Greater-Scope Villain: While Cinder is the greatest direct threat to Jaune and Remnant as a whole, Fate is the real cause of all Jaune's failures and is implied to have been helping Cinder win all along. Then again, since its motives are so unclear, this is more of a case of "Greater Scope Antagonist".
• Groin Attack: Jaune wins his third infamous spar with Cardin by using a smuggled taser on the larger teen's balls. Blake remembering this tactic saves her from Torchwick in Mountain Glenn.
• Gutted Like a Fish: The Beowolf threatening the Arc family wounds Jaune before he finishes killing it. It buries one of its waist-thick clawed hands in his gut, leaving a gaping fissure once the limb falls out and fades away. Jaune would have died in moments from the disemboweling if not for his father unlocking his Aura on the spot. Even with the healing letting him survive, the ordeal of having his midsection practically destroyed leaves a massive and ugly scar formation there.
• Hard Work Hardly Works: Jaune has on multiple occasions devoted entire loops to forging himself into a weapon strong enough to keep all his friends alive, with his record being two years of training prior to Beacon. None of it was enough. The thing that finally wins the day isn't his hard work, which he did little of this time around, but some specific and unprecedented changes that add up to somebody else succeeding where he failed.
• He Knows Too Much:
  • Defied by Blake, who briefly considers killing Jaune to preserve her secret when she sees him disembarking into Beacon along with her, but dismisses the idea, since she's trying to be better than a criminal now. Luckily for her, he has no intention of revealing one of his best friends' secrets.
  • Even in the midst of a mind-melting drug overdose, Jaune still manages to realize that he spilled all his secrets to Torchwick, and he goes on a killing spree through half the train to find Torchwick and silence him before he can bring that knowledge to Cinder.
• Hero Antagonist: Glynda and Ozpin are good people (Jaune admits the latter even in spite of what he's done in previous loops), but cooperating with them is the opposite of what Jaune wants right now. His obstacles in the first arc of the story are these two (respectively firmly and gently) trying to get Jaune to act like a proper Huntsman-in-training for perfectly respectable reasons, but which unbeknownst to them will secure his untimely death.
• Heroic Self-Deprecation:
  • Because Jaune has an incredibly low opinion of himself, he doesn't understand how much effect his own life has on the people around him. Any good things that happen to him lead him to believe he doesn't deserve them. This can mostly be attributed to the fact that unlike any previous loops, he's not attempting to save any of his friends, which leaves him feeling miserable even though he knows it's necessary. Jaune honestly thinks his Jerkass facade in the beginning of the year would be enough to make his friends hate him for the whole loop, or at least barely tolerate his presence. As such, it's obvious throughout the story that he doesn't recognize how much he means to them.
  • It's especially jarring after the first semester ends. When his team starts coming around and liking him, it never occurs to Jaune that his teammates would be more impacted by him risking for them and showing several (if unintentional) times that he does care, than him just being an ass. Blake is genuinely thankful to him for saving her life, loses her paranoia of him, becoming more involved with her team and actively trying to be a friend. Yang gets over her guilt of essentially trapping Jaune in Beacon, establishes a genuine friendship with him after Jaune assuring he's not at all mad, and is happy her team has lost all the bad blood from their forming. Weiss gets past his lazy facade and comes to see that no matter what he may do on the surface, he will always be there for them and will throw away his own life to help them, which ends up with her honestly falling in love with him. Because Jaune believes himself completely at fault for all the problems he solves for them, he doesn't get how thankful they are to him and just passes it off as simple gratitude, and little more.
• Heroic Suicide: Weiss attempts to invoke this, on the assumption that the only way to appease Fate is for the Fall Maiden to die and for Jaune to keep on fighting. It ultimately doesn't come to pass, as she realizes that Jaune will never accept anything less than a happy ending for all of them.
• Heroic Willpower: Jaune is able to fight through horrific injuries, sometimes self-inflicted, with hardly a blink. You'd almost think he Feels No Pain, but he feels it just fine. It's just that he is used to it, extremely motivated, and doesn't fear death.
• Hidden Agenda Villain: The entity that Weiss names "Fate" doesn't have any clear motivation. All we know is that it needs Jaune alive and motivated to do something, but its specific plans and reasons are left unexplained and might very well be too alien to comprehend.
• Hidden Heart of Gold: For the first semester at Beacon, Jaune puts on a facade of being a giant asshole with no respect for anyone and only enough intelligence to be inconsiderate on purpose instead of through indifference. Once this facade breaks and he lets his team get close to him, they consider him to be a Jerk with a Heart of Gold, but they're wrong — the "jerk" part was an act and not part of his real personality in the first place.
• Honor Before Reason: No matter how how much he wants to believe that his friends' lives don't matter because they'll just reset, no matter now much he tries to act like an unlikable asshole so no attachment forms, and no matter how much he wants to prioritize his own survival in this loop to prepare for the next... Jaune just can't overcome his better nature when it counts. Though he knows that Beacon will fall and that some of his friends are sure to die there, he still doesn't want them to suffer or die because of his own choices, even if that hinders his plan or puts his life at risk.
• Honor-Related Abuse: The Arc family imposed the Huntsman career on all of its children, to uphold the honor and glory of the family's historical warriors and heroes. Jaune's father Nicholas had a sister, who was badly wounded on a doomed mission and fled home to recover. For the crime of tarnishing the Arc name with her 'cowardice', her parents pulled the plug on her life support in the hospital. Nicholas disowned them for it, became disillusioned to the romanticized Huntsman lifestyle, and refuses to expose any of his own kids to it in order to break the cycle.
• Hope Is Scary: After this long, Jaune won't allow himself to get invested in his lives or relationships anymore, because he'll just get to watch them be erased for the Nth time. This current life especially, because his lack of training means that he sees it as doomed from the start. He lets himself hope anyway this time, and when it's seemingly dashed at the last moment he breaks down.
• Hypocrite: Weiss accuses Jaune of hypocrisy for his anger at the team for interfering in the Paladin raid, since he's risked his life the same way before and feels no remorse for it. Unbeknownst to her, his life legitimately is not a precious resource, but neither are theirs. Jaune's true hypocrisy is that he won't let them risk their lives, because it will hurt him if they die, but has no problem risking his own because he doesn't have to see it hurt them.
• I Hate Past Me:
  • Jaune can barely remember what he was like in his first life. He only recalls the major things, and none of them are good: that he was bumbling and useless, that he was insufferable in his pursuit of Weiss, that he was too oblivious to notice Pyrrha's clear feelings for him, and that he was too weak to accomplish anything while his friends and partner were fighting and dying.
  • He also hates the romantic wish-fulfillment period he went through long ago in the loops. He cherishes the good memories he made, yet simultaneously looks back on his actions then as scummy and manipulative, pretending at love solely out of boredom.
• I Just Want to Be Normal: The only thing Jaune has wanted all this time is for him and all his friends to make it out the other side of Cinder's catastrophe in one piece. Once he has that, the only thing he could imagine wanting is to simply live life with his friends and family — no traitorous plots, no terrorists, no mass murder, and certainly no repeating the aforementioned three forever. He expects that some of his friends will likely go on to change the world, but he can't see himself doing anything but fading back into mediocrity once his one job is done.
• Important Haircut: Sapphire roughly lops off her signature hip-length braid after making the decision to demand training from her dad, since it'll just "get in the way". For all that she's supposed to be the responsible one, she had nothing useful to contribute when the family is in real danger, and she refuses to let that be the case any longer. They need to take her to a barber to salvage the mess she made of it, though.
• I Need a Freaking Drink: Jaune already isn't having a good time, what with the cosmos itself guilt-tripping him about choosing not to attend Beacon, but having to listen to his parents banging in the next room is the last straw, and he runs off to The Club to get hammered and scrub the memory from his head.
• Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain: "Sympathetic" might be stretching it a bit, but while Cardin is an open racist and bully, a point is made that he's just a stupid kid with an overinflated ego and some ignorant opinions. The fact that Cardin is regularly humiliated by his main target, who is so unaffected by his bullying that he only knows it's happening because he's a time traveler, makes him come off as pathetic and pitiful rather than truly hateable. Jaune's friends object to Cardin's actions based on the principle alone, not because he's actually a threat.
  Weiss: Winchester's lack of skill at bullying is no excuse for you being bullied!
• Innocently Insensitive: Jaune can't tell anybody his full circumstances which would explain all his enigmatic behavior and neuroses, causing his friends to sometimes do things that hit too close to home without knowing better.
  • In their first team training Blake motivates him by ambushing him from behind with her clone and making him counter, which the others consider a success. Meanwhile Jaune is furious, because what they actually do is trigger a Shell-Shocked Veteran into having a gruesome flashback by having him cut apart one of his precious friends who has died violently hundreds of times.
  • He's good at hiding it, but his friends' mild barbs towards Jaune for his lackadaisical attitude and apathy hurt him more than they realize. They don't know he's been fighting an impossible fight for longer than their combined lifespans, and already feels like trash for taking this one loop as a break and abandoning them to their fate.
  • What should ostensibly be a heartwarming moment of solidarity as his friends promise to help him deal with his traumatic nightmares... isn't, it just makes him feel worse, because he isn't "talking" about his nightmares. He finally snaps under their well-intentioned pressure and tries to tell them the truth about himself, and this simply reconfirmed to him that he can't convince them and he's on his own.
• Insistent Terminology:
  • After the dance, Yang sets up a sleepover with Weiss and Blake to help Weiss get over being rejected by Jaune. Blake refuses to call it something so juvenile as a "sleepover", emphasizing that it is a "girls' night in". Weiss does the same.
  • Weiss thinks it's very important for everyone to know that Neo's weapon is a parasol, not an umbrella. To be fair, she does point out tactical differences between the two that might be useful to know, but Qrow just thinks she's splitting hairs when the real threat is the blade hidden inside.
• In Spite of a Nail: The more things change, the more things stay the same, despite Jaune's best efforts... sometimes it's because the same people will always make the same choices, but other times it's thanks to Fate manipulating events so that they end up close enough to the original timeline.
  • The past loops:
    • Every single loop ends up with a massive attack during the Vytal Festival, one way or another. Occasionally he can change the circumstances or spare Beacon itself from being destroyed, but he hasn't managed to prevent some kind of disaster that kills at least one of his friends.
    • No matter what Jaune tries, he can never get his dad to train him as a Huntsman, the very reason he ran away and cheated his enrollment in his first life. He always refuses, makes excuses or procrastinates, and Jaune always has to run away again and train by himself if he wants to get stronger. In the current loop, he finally learns why that is.
    • Jaune has tried a lot of different team configurations, hoping that that might help in the end. But regardless of his efforts, none of them have ever had Weiss partnering with Pyrrha like she always wants. Weiss consistently makes the same bad first impression on Pyrrha, and Pyrrha is better at avoiding her in Initiation than Weiss is at seeking her out.
    • Blake always runs away when her heritage is revealed and gets tangled up in the docks heist. She's too stubborn to drop her guilt about the White Fang and simply needs that experience in order to learn the lesson and overcome that flaw, it can't be forced. Jaune tries in this loop, but isn't surprised when it doesn't work.
    • Apparently, Jaune has never been able to prevent the events of the Initiation, the Forever Fall trip, the Breach, or the food fight from happening in roughly the same way as they originally did.
  • Despite his warnings not to, Jaune's companions in Initiation manage to bumble into the Deathstalker cave and wake the thing up. None of them are even willing to admit he is right as they flee.
  • Apparently, in Dr. Oobleck's class Jaune gets caught up in the same interaction, having to answer Oobleck's question about General Lagune and Fort Castle. He knows the answer this time, but playing the part of a lazy fool, he responds that Lagune lost his infamous battle because of "stupidity".
  • Jaune successfully prevents Mercury from testing Pyrrha in sparring class and figuring out her Semblance, putting a damper on Cinder's plans. But then Pyrrha gets involved in Cinder's attack on the CCT, revealing it to her anyway. But the fact it is revealed conspicuously against an enemy rather than secretly against a spy means the conspiracy sees it as a point against her becoming the Fall Maiden, contributing to the power being given to Weiss instead.
  • Thanks to Jaune's meddling, Cinder doesn't manage to nurture the kind of public unrest that she needs, intending to drive it home with a Breaking Speech broadcast to the whole world, spiking negativity. So she changes her plan from a scathing indictment of the peoples' leaders and protectors to incite a Grimm invasion plus a White Fang attack, to a straightforward terrorist attack, replacing anger with fear and getting the result she wants anyway.
• Internal Reveal: In Chapter 35, Blake talks to Yang about her own first meeting with Jaune on the day she left the White Fang. In turn, Yang comes clean to her about the circumstances of Jaune's enrollment at Beacon.
• Interrupted Intimacy:
  • Blake and Adam's fateful train heist crosses their paths with Jaune, who is in the middle of screwing some girl in the cargo area. His partner promptly grabs discarded clothing (including his) to cover herself and runs away in panic.
  • While he's recovering from fighting Roman Torchwick, Jaune's and Ruby's teams walk in on him and Beacon's doctor having sex.
• Invulnerable Knuckles: Subverted by Jaune early on, demonstrating why Aura is so valuable to a Huntsman. He's more than skilled enough to fight a Beowolf unarmed, but punching the thing breaks his hand.
• I Resemble That Remark!: Jaune denies that he should be treated as Blake's "dad" for the purposes of Sun getting his "blessing" to woo her. But he justifies this by complaining about Blake in a way that makes him sound like a parent venting about their unruly child, which Sun just laughs at.
• Irony:
  • Jaune was never able to get any training from his dad to prepare for Beacon. Events in this latest loop cause his dad to finally agree to train him... but at a time when he neither needs it (not intending to attend Beacon) nor wants it (there's nothing left Nicholas could really teach him).
  • In a role reversal from canon, it's Ruby who tries to get a nervous and awkward Yang to be social on the first night at Beacon.
  • Jaune initially had a crush on Weiss in his first life. Weiss falls in love with him for the first time in his most recent and very last loop. In addition, she says in the original loop that "never in a thousand years" would she date him... sure enough, it takes over a thousand subjective years for her to actually date him.
  • The loop where Jaune tries his damnedest to stay out of things to prepare for the next loop is the one where he finally succeeds and breaks free.
• I Take Offense to That Last One: Jaune's only defense against Ozpin listing all of the reckless and criminal actions he took during the docks incident is that he didn't try to fight a superior opponent. Torchwick wears mascara, so he can't be superior.
• It Gets Easier: By the time the story starts Jaune has been trapped in his time looping for hundreds of years, and has gone from a naive doormat with a decent heart to someone whose only problem with killing is that most of the time the consequences aren't worth it. In this case it isn't just a matter of him taking enough lives that he's no longer affected — because he isn't just living a long time, he's going back in time, literally nothing he does has any permanent impact, not even death. When he finally finds something that will be lost forever if he resets — his unborn sibling's existence — he reacts like a normal person would to the prospect of taking a life.
• It's Not You, It's Me: Jaune tries to let Weiss down gently, giving this as the reason. She can only chuckle bitterly that she never expected anyone would use the line on her of all people. He's telling the truth, though not the way he explains it to her. Part of it is that he knows anyone close to him is in mortal danger, but the fact is that he would still go for it, if not for already carrying so many bad memories of loss that he can't bear any more, even for temporary happiness.
• It Sucks to Be the Chosen One: Apparently, being an essential piece in destiny's game means that if you try to go off-script or make a happier ending for yourself, Fate itself will go out of its way to break you down until you accept the suffering it intends for you.
• Jack of All Trades: Over his dozens of lifetimes, Jaune has learned a ridiculous number of skills, just about anything he could think of that would help him save his friends and end the loops. He's mastered sword-and-board fighting from Pyrrha, unarmed fighting from Yang and Ren, marksmanship from Ruby, first aid (incidentally including emergency childbirth as part of paramedic training), hardware and software hacking, driving and piloting, pickpocketing, personal training, and pickup artistry.
• Jerkass Gods: Fate is determined to screw Jaune over until he gives up and follows its script.
• Jerkass Realization:
  • Earlier in the loops, not knowing how to escape his predicament, Jaune decided to indulge in some wish fulfillment. He sought out romantic relationships with many of his friends and acquaintances, usually ending fatally. Eventually there was one loop where he made pure, idealistic Ruby fall in love with him... for nothing but variety's sake. Since then he's become disgusted with that period in his lives, and at how he callously played games with his friends' hearts like that when he was supposed to protect them. He doesn't pursue romance anymore for that reason.
  • It doesn't stop him from going through with it (a logical epiphany does that), but being forced by circumstances to delay his running away from home causes Jaune to interact with his family for the first time in hundreds of years. He feels worse and worse about the prospect of leaving them without a word like he has so many times (especially this time, which he finds out is his birthday), and promises to make it up to them when he finally wins.
• Jerkass to One: Nicholas Arc is a devoted husband and father, and all around pleasant guy. But he's incredibly guarded and short towards Ozpin, for reasons that he never fully goes into but seem to at least involve Ozpin being highly placed in the Huntsman profession, which Nicholas has long since lost faith in. For his part, Ozpin just thinks it's a shame that one of his favorite students is now so standoffish with him.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: In order to avoid getting his classmates attached to him, as well as boost his chances of getting expelled from Beacon, Jaune decides to fend them away by pretending to be a lazy, racist Jerkass, who casually seduces random women, doesn't give a damn about his teammates and dishes out spoilers to books without a warning. It works for a while, until they realize just how much Jaune cares about them. He ends up being perceived as this by most of the cast.
• Keeping the Enemy Close: In the past Jaune has tried simply outing Cinder and her associates as traitors, but that just makes her flee into Vale's underground, and losing her legal access to the school is an irritating but recoverable setback. Cinder needing to change her plans away from Jaune's sight makes her unpredictable to him, while her cover and plans remaining reasonably intact give her no reason to deviate from what Jaune knows.
• Kick the Dog: Jaune is furious with his team after they interfere in the Paladin raid. While tearing into them the next day, he goes out of his way to use some very personal lines that he knows will hurt them, just to make them feel as shitty as he does. He later refuses to concede he was wrong to be angry, but apologizes for some of the specific things he said, admitting that it wasn't fair to them and there's no excuse for it.
• Killed Offscreen: Roman Torchwick gets killed by Jaune, but the act itself is never shown. Mercury and Emerald both die during The Battle of Beacon, also offscreen. With Emerald it's soon Subverted. Weiss sees her corpse the first time around, but after being sent back in time a few minutes, she runs past in time to witness her death.
• Knight Templar Big Brother: The prospect of potential romantic partners for any of his sisters (older ones included) makes Jaune torn between the opinion that his sisters are amazing and any guy should beg for their attention... and that regardless, none of them had better try, or else.
• Late to the Realization:
  • Jaune isn't actually quick on the uptake — he's just lived a few years of his life so many times that he knows them front-to-back. Anything that he hasn't seen hundreds of times, he usually takes ages to cotton on to. Things like his mother having another kid, Weiss becoming interested in him romantically, and anyone besides Pyrrha being approached to become the Fall Maiden.
  • Ruby is the only one who takes Jaune's Blatant Lies about Grimm fumbling and offing themselves around him at face value. When this comes out, the others try and point out all the ways that makes no sense, but she still doesn't get it.
• Leader Wannabe: Weiss, as in canon, albeit the situation is a bit different. She detests the fact that Jaune, who initially appeared to be nothing but a Lazy Bum was made a team leader instead of her and wants to assume this role herself. Unlike Ruby in canon, Jaune is actually willing to hand the leadership over to Weiss, partially so that he can avoid the spotlight, but also to simply save himself effort. Weiss eventually changes her mind and decides to make Jaune into a worthy leader instead, much to his annoyance. Ironically, as the team dynamics stabilize Weiss essentially becomes the team's co-leader in the form of the Team Mom, which only reinforces the Dysfunctional Family image everyone has of Team JWBY.
• Like an Old Married Couple: Jaune basically ends up like this for his entire team, but especially Weiss, which is one reason it became a joke to refer to them as the Mom and Dad of the team. It's also this approach that eventually gains Weiss's romantic interest, when all Jaune's past attempts at conventional wooing failed until he gave up entirely.
• Likes Older Women: Most of Jaune's early flings were with middle-aged women, to the point where it was a known aspect of his reputation in his hometown. The youngest lady he's shown to have went for is one of his older sister's friends in her early twenties. Jaune is mentally ancient and has no interest in adolescent fumbling with girls his own physical age — not since he stopped trying for real romance. At Beacon his most common partners are in upper years (plus at least one staff member) for the same reason.
• Locked Out of the Loop:
  • One thing Jaune has tried to do in the past was work for the villains in order to gain intel. It didn't end up nearly as productive as he hoped, because Cinder keeps her subordinates on a need-to-know basis. Even when working for her, he wasn't trusted enough to be told anything sensitive.
  • The full circumstances behind Jaune's enrollment at Beacon are kept quiet by the people who know about them. Ruby knows that Yang got into a fight with Jaune but doesn't know about the consequences that are forced on him for it. Nicholas is the one to deal with the fallout at the police station and knows everything, but doesn't go further than giving Yang a Death Glare when she meets his family because he doesn't want to stir up drama. Yang herself can't work up the nerve to come clean to anyone, until she tells Blake in Chapter 35 to shoot down her incorrect theories about Jaune's behavior.
  • Jaune ends up being the only one in his friend group not to know about his "engagement" to Coral, who's his sister but the other students don't know that. Coral herself knows about the misconception, but doesn't set the record straight to Jaune or his friends because she finds it hilarious.
• Look Behind You: Jaune wins his second infamous spar with Cardin by calling a timeout, because the Headmaster is at the classroom door trying to get everyone's attention... and then braining the larger teen out cold when everyone turns to the empty doorway.
• Loss of Identity: Jaune has gone through so many loops and experienced so much he is a fundamentally different person than who he started as. This is noted In-Universe by his family noticing how his personality completely changed one random day with no logical reason.
• Loveable Sex Maniac:
  • Jaune soon realizes that without needing to train he has to fill up his day, and he very much does. This is somewhat Deconstructed, however. While the Arcs love their son and brother, they're apprehensive about his libido and choice of partners, not to mention occasions where his behavior causes actual problems (like getting the family banned from a produce store after he sleeps with the owner's wife). His classmates at Beacon don't get to see his "loveable" side at first, and his habits are considered to be just one in a sea of un-loveable traits. By the second semester he's become less of this trope as his frequency of partners drops way down, especially after Weiss confesses her feelings to him, but his reputation persists.
  • His sister Coral as well, something the two connect on. One of her only real interests is raunchy subject matters, which she writes as an amateur novelist. Unlike Jaune, she doesn't actually seek out sex for real and probably never has.
• Love at First Sight: Defied. After falling for Pyrrha and losing her countless times, Jaune started taking steps to ensure that no chemistry occurs between them anymore. In the current loop, their first meeting consisted of Jaune bumping into Pyrrha and refusing to help her up, or even talk to her in any meaningful way.
• Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: Not usually, actually. Jaune is long past caring about his own life, so he hasn't regularly used Crocea Mors's shield form in ages, preferring to wield the sword two-handed or fight dirty with his off-hand. The first time he pulls it out in the current loop is when he has to fight off The Club's entire mob of gun-toting gangsters. The second time is during his Final Battle against Adam.

M-R

• Made Myself Sad: Sometimes, Jaune's thought process will get lost in an anecdote from a past loop. While a lot of the time the memories are good ones, they're dampened by the fact that every single one of Jaune's lives has ended badly one way or another. In particular, the repeated reference to the incident where he got with Winter Schnee always starts out smug at having done so, only to get more somber immediately when he remembers that it happened as Sex for Solace to distract each other from their grief after Weiss's funeral.
• Magic Is a Monster Magnet: All else being equal, Grimm are known to be more attracted to individuals with an unlocked Aura than without. Nicholas explains to Jaune that that's the main reason normal civilians don't have theirs unlocked, since it puts them in greater danger and it's not feasible to give everyone combat training to protect themselves.
• Major Injury Underreaction: One of the traits that most disturbs Jaune's loved ones and enemies is the fact that he doesn't seem to care about his own health and safety even when they're actively in peril. His only response to being nearly bisected by a Beowolf is to calmly ask whether his sisters are safe. His circle at Beacon quickly get exasperated at how much he downplays his life-threatening injuries and refuses to let them help him in recovery. Roman's attempt to beat information out of him just makes him laugh.
• Making Love in All the Wrong Places: Some of Jaune's notable locations of choice for his dalliances include the dust carriage of a mixed-cargo train, and his dorm's en suite bathroom. The latter in particular pisses his team off.
• Make It Look Like an Accident: Cinder attempts to seriously injure or kill Weiss in sparring class by picking up and returning her weapon to her after winning, only to seemingly fumble and cause a Fire Dust misfire. In reality, it's her own Maiden power of fire that triggers the explosion, and Jaune is on guard enough to predict what's happening and take the blast in Weiss's place.
• Malicious Misnaming:
  • Jaune never refers to Blake by her actual name for most of the first semester, to make himself seem like a mixture of inconsiderate jerk and complete idiot. He does use the name... but only when his team demands the name of the random student he was just screwing in their shower.
  • Torchwick calls several different White Fang members "Perry". He admits that he can't be bothered to remember which one of his "animal" minions is actually Perry and just uses the name randomly.
• Mental Time Travel: The nature of Jaune's repeats. His mind is the only thing that travels back in time after death, while his body is just as young - and weak - as it originally was in a given point in time. Jaune even lacks muscle memory he previously built up, making it hard for him to properly utilize all his experience.
• Merger of Souls: Now knowing about Pyrrha and the Fall Maiden from his original life, Jaune has at times pressured Pyrrha to accept the conspiracy's offer and fuse her soul with the dying Amber earlier, before Beacon's fall is already in progress and Cinder can interrupt. Pyrrha being stronger and Cinder being weaker still hasn't been enough to turn the tables against the villain. Though the teachers worry that Amber's soul might affect Pyrrha's sense of identity, Jaune hasn't noticed any sign of such a result. It's a different story with Weiss, who has some of her own memories overlap with Amber's. That difference in how they respond to the aura merger proves to be very important.
• Misery Trigger: Yang instantly clams up in shame and guilt when something reminds her of her actions at The Club.
• Missing Steps Plan: Ruby's plan to "fix" Jaune sounds pretty good, except for the middle part. Justified, as step one is finding out the problem in the first place.
  Phase one was figuring out was wrong with [Jaune], phase two was something or other, and phase three was Jaune being happy and everyone being best friends.
• Mistaken for Cheating: When Jaune's team is falsely informed that he's engaged, their anger at his sleeping around only gets worse under the impression that it's infidelity. Soon after, Jaune complains to his sister Coral that it's suddenly got way harder to bed girls because his team keeps cockblocking him while giving him the stink-eye. This misunderstanding is resolved by another misunderstanding. They don't learn that his supposed fiancée is actually his sister and the engagement is a lie. Rather, they meet said fiancée and, seeing her encourage him to perv on girls, interpret them as being in an open relationship.
• Mistaken for Pregnant: For the rest of the day after Winter arrives at Beacon, she drags Weiss into a private discussion about propriety, reputation, and birth control. None of which has anything to do with the position she'd just arrived to find her younger sister in with Jaune, honest. The next morning, she'd just like to make sure that Weiss isn't feeling queasy or having any strange cravings lately. Winter still isn't fully convinced until she corners Jaune himself and gets his side.
• Mistaken for Racist: After Jaune kills White Fang soldiers at the docks, he's scheduled for mandatory counseling with Oobleck. When it becomes clear that Jaune not only killed them without hesitation but is utterly unaffected by having done so, some of his later sessions are described as thinly-veiled attempts to get him to admit to latent racism. In reality, them being faunus had little (not nothing, granted) to do with it — he just has no problem killing people because over a thousand years It Gets Easier. Oobleck comes to the right conclusion (if not the full reason), and doesn't know if that's better or worse.
• Mistakenly Attacked Mole: Jaune tries to crash the Paladin rally as "Silver", only for him to be found out by the villains just in time for Qrow to arrive as requested and find Team RWBY staking the place out themselves. The whole gathering descends into chaos when Qrow rushes in to save his contact from being executed, RWBY following behind but not knowing the full story. Jaune makes a break for it, but Weiss assumes he's just another White Fang thug trying to flee and puts herself in his way, then seriously wounds him when he tries to fight his way past.
• Mood Whiplash: Yang sees the entire first semester at Beacon as one continuous flip-flop between hope that her team is becoming functional and despair when those hopes are dashed, over and over. When Blake runs away after her argument with Weiss and Jaune, she doesn't think she can handle any more, and is prepared to give up on the team and quit Beacon if they can't resolve the issue.
• Moral Myopia: Something that's really messed up about Jaune when it comes down to it is his thoughtless brutality. It barely registers to him that he personally saw to the deaths of dozens of people at the docks heist, some of whom no doubt had loved ones — not even sadistic pleasure, just indifference to the prospect of taking lives. Conversely, inflicting anything like that on the few specific people he has a (supernaturally cemented) bond with is unforgivable to him, no matter the context. This attitude confounds and unnerves the teachers, who debate for some time whether it's safe to even keep him enrolled or if he's a potential danger to the other students.
• Mundane Solution: One of Jaune's first attempts to end the loops had him simply putting a bomb in Cinder's dorm, killing her, Mercury, Emerald, and Neo in one fell swoop. It ultimately backfired when this meant that no one was holding Adam back, and he launched an attack on Vale that killed Jaune anyway.
• Mundane Utility: One of the benefits of resetting back to the past when you die is that you can learn just about anything you want through the blunt process of trial and error. Among other things, Jaune has a good idea of which women are... ahem, safe to sleep with, because he's slept with some that weren't.
• Mutual Kill: Even though neither of them intended it, Jaune and Adam end up pulling this off during the Battle of Beacon.
• My Friends... and Zoidberg: Jaune doesn't feel exactly right grouping Coral in with the rest of the Arc family, and addresses her separately in his first letter home in Beacon. In hindsight, that probably didn't help the misunderstanding when his team got the impression that Coral is his fiancée rather than his blood relative...
• My Master, Right or Wrong: In past loops, Qrow always treated Jaune's warnings better than most. He was Cowboy Cop enough that he always argued Jaune's tipoffs should be taken seriously and Jaune himself should be let free to continue helping them instead of being distrusted and imprisoned for what he knew, which holds up in the present loop. But no matter what, he would always defer to Ozpin on the issue, leading to Jaune being locked away.
• Mysterious Informant: Jaune takes on the guise of a White Fang traitor, later coming up with the pseudonym "Silver" (after Sylver, his aunt that he never got to meet), in order to anonymously feed the authorities information he knows about criminal activity. He takes this approach because telling the authorities openly always ended badly for him in previous loops.
• Mythology Gag: Team RRNN takes the same student mission that Team JNPR chose the first time around, for the same reason (Nora and Ren want to go). But unlike canon, we get the reason the two wanted that mission: the destination is a village they know.
• Naked First Impression: Blake first meets Jaune this loop when her fateful train heist coincides with him having picked up a random girl for a quickie on one of the cargo cars. At seeing terrorists suddenly invade the train, his partner grabs handfuls of clothes and flees, leaving him with nothing. Blake spends the rest of the scene desperately fighting her eyes not to see anything they can't un-see.
• Nap-Inducing Speak: Not that Jaune was known for his ability to stay awake, but at one point he gets in some trouble at school because he fell asleep listening to a guest speaker. Said speaker was none other than Peter Port, the man whose voice has long been ingrained into Jaune's brain as an extra-strength tranquilizer.
• Never Be Hurt Again: Jaune doesn't have it in him anymore to pursue romance, not even with Weiss, when he finally catches her interest, because he knows it will end badly and he'll have to carry that trauma forever. As he says, there comes a point where the pain of loss starts to outweigh the happiness gained in the moment, and he's long past that point.
• Never-Forgotten Skill: Over his many repeats, Jaune has picked up a number of useful skills, such as being able to remove his presence, hacking, picking pockets, etc. Just about any skill that relies on knowledge and theory, he mostly retains between loops. But this doesn't apply to things that need athleticism and muscle memory, meaning he loses most of his fighting ability whenever he dies.
• Nightmare Sequence: Jaune experiences nightmares of his loved ones dying every night, usually in ways they died in a previous repeat.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: This is Jaune's solution to the issue of Cardin. He lures the bully into a vacant classroom, and just beats the everloving shit out of him, makes it very clear that he would have no trouble killing him, very nearly does so to prove that he will, and extracts a panicked and shaken promise not to even breathe in his direction again or else. Jaune privately acknowledges that Cardin didn't really deserve it, and he was just indulging his built-up anger and frustration using him as a punching bag.
• Noodle Incident:
  • In a throwaway line early on, Jaune mentions that if he can't find someone to unlock his Aura for him then he can do it himself. What such an act would entail, and why it's a backup plan instead of his first choice, isn't remotely alluded to, and canon offers no hints either. Apparently he needed to learn how at some point, or felt he did, but this is one story of his that goes untold.
  • Jaune once tried dating Nora. Once. He doesn't give many details, but the fact that she wanted Ren included as well was just one of the reasons why that relationship was... unique.
• Not Afraid to Die: Even when faced with the possibility of dying permanently, Jaune doesn't feel any fear. Apparently, death is much less scary the thousandth time around. It's only at the eleventh hour that Jaune starts to fear his own death, thanks to becoming invested in a life again for the first time in ages.
• The Not-Love Interest: As far as Jaune's considerable experience shows, Weiss simply has no romantic attraction to him no matter what, so the idea doesn't even enter his head anymore. So when Weiss becomes unusually close with him this loop, to the point where people start making comparisons, he just laughs it off and assumes it must be this trope at best. Then it ends up Subverted, and he's the last one to notice. The real qualifier for the trope is probably Blake, who in this loop has an emotional arc with Jaune that ends up as a quasi-father-daughter relationship rather than a romantic one.
• "Not So Different" Remark:
  • While it's not nearly the same magnitude, Nicholas Arc is made to acknowledge that by controlling his kids' futures, in some small way he was similar to his own parents.
  • Adam Taurus points out how similar he and Jaune are during their duel, with both men being wholly dedicated to fighting for something they believe to be near impossible. Unusually for this trope, it is not a What the Hell, Hero? moment, nor is there a We Can Rule Together offer attached to it - it's just a simple observation on Adam's part, out of respect for a similarly dedicated opponent. Jaune agrees with that, but remains equally opposed to Adam as well.
• Not So Stoic: Winter's reserved, aloof persona collapses immediately when she catches her little sister Weiss in a what appears to be an intimate embrace with Jaune, whom she knows from Weiss' own letters to be a notorious playboy. When Weiss makes an Innocent Innuendo about what they were up to, Winter's knees actually buckle under her and she has to grip a door frame to remain standing.
• Not What It Looks Like: Jaune's reputation precedes him, he is mostly happy to let it.
  • The aftermath of Jaune and Blake's first meeting on the fateful train heist is the two of them being caught by his family, while Jaune is stark naked. They're right that he was off screwing some girl, but mistakenly assume that Blake was said girl.
  • When Jaune's team answers his scroll while he's away from it, caller Amber's first response is to complain to her mom that Jaune broke his promise not to answer while he's doing naughty things.
  • One morning during break, Yang tries to call Blake, and a half-awake Jaune answers her scroll. By way of explanation, he says that she can't answer because she's in the shower, and hangs up. When Yang hunts them down for the truth, he only feeds into it by factually stating that yes, they were sleeping together, in the same bed no less, and she's already met his family.
  • Winter first meets Jaune while he's happily sharing a tender hug with Weiss at the end of an emotional conversation. Knowing his reputation, Winter immediately comes to the worst yet eventually correct conclusion.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: Along with his facade of being an asshole, Jaune also puts on a facade of social and intellectual idiocy. Not only does he constantly get Blake's name wrong, he acts like he can't even remember that she's his teammate or that they haven't had sex. Whenever his circle of friends aren't glaring holes in him for his behavior, they're pulling their hair out at how dense he is.
• Oblivious to His Own Description: While gearing up before Mountain Glenn, Ruby questions Jaune if he actually knows how to use the gun he's packing. He tells her that he was taught by someone he knew, a weapons nut who was brave, loyal, wanted to protect everyone... and wasn't the type to share her cookies. Ruby says based on the last bit that they probably wouldn't get along.
• Oblivious to Love: Even after spending the good part of the last millennium mostly around women, forming multiple relationships over the years and knowing the girl in question inside out, Jaune still manages to fall under this trope when Weiss develops an affection towards him. In his experience, Weiss falling in love with him is something that simply doesn't happen, so it catches Jaune - and only Jaune - completely by surprise.
• Obvious Rule Patch: Every time Jaune spars in Glynda's class, she's forced to add another rule banning something he's done. Occasionally, she adds a rule before he even does anything.
• Offing the Offspring: In this loop, Jaune finally learns that he had an aunt. Emphasis on had. Her name was Sylver, she was Nicholas's older sister and a Huntress, and one day she fled wounded from a doomed mission instead of staying and dying. The heads of the Arc family, who were obsessed with family honor and heroics, saw this as a stain on their reputation and punished her by taking her off life support. It's this event that caused Nicholas to disown his family and become disillusioned with the romanticization of Huntsmen.
• One Dialogue, Two Conversations:
  • Immediately after waking up in this loop, Jaune learns that his dad is away on a mission and starts to panic, because he needs to steal supplies and equipment (i.e. Crocea Mors) before he can run away and get started on training, and he's losing precious time he fought to the death for. Unbeknownst to him (as he's long since forgotten it), his birthday is the next day, and his mom thinks he's freaking out about his dad missing it.
  • When Jaune volunteers to spar with Pyrrha while Winter is observing the class, his friends ask him if he's trying to prove himself to Winter, and he confirms it as a cover for his real motive. What Jaune means to imply is that he's trying to get into Winter's pants as per usual. What everyone actually takes from it is that Weiss is off-limits and he wants her sister's approval. This spirals into more two-sided dialogues, and culminates in Jaune unwittingly standing Weiss up at the school dance.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business:
  • Normally unshakeable and logical Coral Arc tries to do something comforting for no practical reason when the whole family is poised to be killed by a Grimm.
  • The first time Jaune calls Blake by her real name is to call her out on defending the White Fang as "misunderstood". His unusually visceral hatred for the Fang forms the basis of most of his friends' theories about what's wrong with him.
• Out-of-Character Alert: Yang might be very physical and quick to anger around Volume 1, but even then it's unlike her to just deck a civilian in the face with little provocation as she does to Jaune at The Club. Looking back she expresses frustration, guilt, and confusion about where that uncharacteristic anger came from, especially since she's done nothing like it before or since. Jaune privately chalks it up as yet more evidence that something was trying to force him into Beacon, using her as a pawn. He's completely right.
• Outside-Context Problem: Jaune's predicament is so far outside of context that no one has ever believed him about it. Not even Ozpin, the one man on the planet who has an idea of the unfathomable forces at work on Remnant, is willing to accept an ancient time-traveler reliving the last few years over and over.
• Papa Wolf: Played for Laughs with Jaune and Blake. He's not only not her dad, he's the same age as her, but as per the team's dynamic he has the attitude of a dad, and has been known to cause millions of lien in property damage and dozens of deaths to protect his "daughter". Sun comes to Jaune for his blessing to pursue Blake, half-jokingly claiming he wants to Meet the In-Laws, and in return Jaune makes over-the-top threats (that Sun knows are precedented) to make the kid squirm for kicks.
• Pass the Popcorn: In the background of Jaune and Winter's awkward first meeting is Qrow, who puts away his booze so he can watch, record, and laugh his ass off.
• Peggy Sue: The basic premise of the story, albeit it is strongly played on and Deconstructed.
• Point of Divergence: Jaune has lived so much subjective time and trauma that he doesn't even remember anymore how the loops and the plot started. Weiss gets the whole story at the end: instead of carrying on after Beacon's fall and experiencing Volumes 4 and beyond, Jaune succumbed to despair and committed suicide. This threw a wrench in Fate's intended plan, and it brought Jaune back to try and get an outcome that was close enough to work. The end result of that one act is hundreds of alternate timelines that seemingly still exist, culminating in one timeline that has gone completely off the rails because Fate was convinced to give up on its plan.
• Power Incontinence:
  • Yang reveals she unlocked her Semblance at school, and caused a massive ruckus because one of its effects is that she bursts into flame. It burned one of her friends' hair, she was freaking out thinking it was burning her own hair (and her head's on fire), the helpful pamphlet on Semblances incinerated when she picked it up to read it, her dad had to put himself out after trying to calm her down with a hug, Zwei was going nuts, and Qrow was dying laughing... up until Yang remembered to stop-drop-and-roll, in their wooden home.
  • Ruby also suffered from this when she was little, generally in the form of misjudging when to "put on the brakes" to avoid running into walls and people she was running up to hug.
• Powers That Be: Although it is hardly all-powerful, Fate fits this trope due to being an impersonal entity with godlike capabilities.
• Psychological Projection: Whenever some character tries to understand Jaune's psyche, they tend to project themselves onto him and base their explanations on that. For example, Ruby attributes his behaviour to having lost somebody earlier in life, while Blake suspects he has some dark past he is hiding. Perhaps worryingly, Adam Taurus gets closest to the truth, seeing Jaune as a single-minded Well-Intentioned Extremist, who will do anything to achieve his goals.
• Psychosomatic Superpower Outage: This turns out to be the source of Jaune's aura issues. Aura is an extension of the soul that protects the body, but Jaune has been acting so out of character for much of this loop that his soul couldn't even recognize him as the thing it's supposed to protect. When he's doing what comes naturally — fighting to protect his friends — his aura works, but when he's going behind their backs, trying to keep out of trouble, and rejecting his nature, it weakens and vanishes. During the Battle of Beacon he resolves to stand and fight to the end, solving the issue.
• Really 700 Years Old: Physically, Jaune is a perfectly normal teenager. Mentally, he might be well over one thousand years old - he lost track of time a long time ago.
• Really Gets Around: Through his many, many repeats, Jaune has gotten pretty good at convincing certain women to sleep with him. It is one of the rare male examples where such behavior isn't treated as something to be proud of. Most characters find it disgusting, and the narrative paints it more as a coping habit for Jaune than anything else. By the current loop, he literally doesn't even find the female body to be especially appealing anymore, it's just the physical act of sex that he seeks out, showing how dysfunctional he's become to get to this point.
• Refuge in Audacity: With all his experience and lack of fear of consequences, Jaune has a tendency to do ludicrous things to deflect and mostly get away with them, trading existential dread for regular embarrassment.
  • In general, when he is truly desperate to get others to leave him alone about something, he'll simply tell the truth and tell them that he's a time traveller. Since no one ever believes him, they eventually take the excuse to mean that they're simply not going to get anywhere with him and the subject gets dropped.
  • When his team is on his case about his health again, Jaune threatens to spank Yang over his knee like a child. Though she tries to teasingly play up the "dad and daughter" schtick more, before she finishes her sentence he does just that. Now with an angry Yang no longer concerned for his health, he has good reason to flee from the others as well. They find him again in class, where Yang won't risk a teacher's wrath by attacking him in revenge, and by the time class ends she's calmed down.
  • In order to diffuse the tension of his embarassing first meeting with Winter, he interrupts her introduction by acting as if she's trying to pull an online Atlesian General scam on him. He says this to a person literally standing in the room with him, and who actually is the assistant to an Atlesian General. At that point everybody just gives up and moves on from the topic of the compromising position they'd caught him in with Weiss.
• Refusal of the Call: Jaune desperately tries to refuse every call that destiny gives him by refusing to apply to Beacon and attempting to get himself expelled once he gets drafted anyway. Since he knows that he has no real chance of winning against Cinder, it's hard to blame him. It later turns out Jaune has been unwittingly falling into this trope in all of his repeats by not accepting any of his friends' deaths, thus not allowing the intended course of events to occur.
• Relationship Reset Button: A major reason that Jaune is the way he is is because this has happened to him hundreds of times. He can't begin to describe how much it hurt him to form connections with his True Companions or even fall in love... only to die and wake up to them treating him like a stranger, over and over.
• Relationship-Salvaging Disaster: Weiss wrings one date out of Jaune as a favor, but it starts off horribly and the evening appears to be dead in the water. Then the two are attacked in the streets by White Fang thugs. Against all expectations, the brutal combat breaks the tension between them, helping them both realize they should stop trying act like their idea of a perfect date and just let their natural chemistry happen. Once they're done talking to the cops, their evening goes far better from that point. This both reaffirms Weiss's feelings for Jaune, and confirms her decision to accept the Fall Maiden's power.
• Resurrective Immortality: Jaune has a version of this causing him to undergo a Mental Time Travel each time his body dies. Although there is no telling whether or not that would work if he died before the initiation.
• Retcon:
  • A throwaway line in the first chapter says that Jaune hasn't ever burned to death until the loop immediately preceding the current one. This doesn't really make sense given how long he's been fighting Cinder, so it's later said that it's by far his most common cause of death, that he knows Cinder's fire better than his mother's touch, and that he actually has a stress response to open flame in general thanks to his experiences.
  • It's minor, but according to the provided Arc family timeline, Amber Arc is thirteen years old when Jaune's first (and only) year of Beacon begins. Later, she is changed to be fourteen at that time, and turns fifteen between the first and second semesters. For what it's worth, at least one later fic goes with the adjusted age instead of the first one.
• Ret-Gone:
  • Partway through, Jaune has a troubling realization: his mother is pregnant with kid number nine. He wants to meet his new sibling, but if he dies and resets, that future life will be erased forever. It's that thought that starts to get him invested in fighting back again, if only indirectly at first.
  • Because Jaune only knows the things he knows about his looping from experience, there's a question he ponders but can't answer: are the worlds erased when he dies, reverting everything and causing this trope, or do they keep going after his death, throwing him into a new timeline? Either way, it doesn't affect Jaune so he thinks it doesn't matter... until the very end, because it's the latter. He finally has an ally who knows what's going on, so after he dies like always, there's someone who knows to Screw Destiny in his place.
• Retroactive Precognition: Jaune knows just about everything that's intended to happen to Vale, Beacon, and his friend group for the entire first school year, having seen it so many times before. This is played more realistically than usual, as there's nothing that says his knowledge must come true, just that it's supposed to if not for meddling. His future knowledge becomes increasingly useless as he uses it, as people's intentions change in response to his actions.
• Revealing Injury: Just barely avoided. When Jaune needs his burns treated and his team get a better look at him shirtless, Weiss notices the scar that she unknowingly left on "Silver" during the Paladin raid. She does make the connection, but not knowing about what Jaune's secretly been doing and his ongoing Aura troubles, assumes it could only be a coincidence. She only learns the truth when Jaune spells out that he was at the raid that night, and has the scars to prove it, while he's in the process of dumping the full extent of his story on her.
• Revenge by Proxy: After Jaune kills Torchwick at the Breach, Neo is devastated, and makes multiple attempts to murder Jaune's family as vengeance.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: Almost every conclusion Jaune's circle makes about what's wrong with him is technically correct. He does have a past he's hiding, he has lost somebody, he does have personal history with the White Fang, and he almost certainly is clinically depressed. But none of them can make headway into learning any specifics because all of those things are the result of the unbelievable circumstances that Jaune is secretly trapped in, and not anything they can ask about or look up.
• Right Through the Wall: Jaune ends up at The Club to escape hearing his parents go at it in the adjacent hotel room. Before deciding to just leave, his response is to bang on the wall, angrily ask whether they think they have enough damn kids already, and try to drown it out with a pillow while lamenting that he didn't think to pack headphones.
• Rocky Roll Call: Jaune's team finally catching up to him in class, after the spanking incident, devolves into this, as everyone is too flustered/livid/exasperated/smarmy to articulate anything more complex. Nora completes the joke by proudly bellowing her own name into the exchange.
• Running Gag:
  • Jaune never calls Blake by her real name, or at least, not until the dock incident.
  • Yang jokingly calls Jaune and Weiss "Dad" and "Mom". Later Blake joins her, with even Ruby's team referring to Jaune and Weiss as Yang's and Blake's parents.
  • No one on Team JWBY aka "Team Jazzberry" likes the name.
  • Several times Weiss says there's no possible way Winter would sleep with Jaune. Jaune himself knows for a fact that she's wrong.
  • Jaune keeps dunking on Torchwick for wearing mascara.

S-Y

• Sacrificial Lion: It turns out there is an In-Universe case. Fate needs somebody to die during the Fall of Beacon, other than Jaune that is, for some unclear and likely incomprehensible reason. In all the previous timelines this role was bestowed on Pyrrha, but apparently Weiss works just as well.
• Same Character, But Different: Jaune retains a core of ambivalence towards his own worth as a person, but the hundreds of years he has over everyone else have completely warped him. Attention is deliberately drawn to the contrast of him versus the people in his life, who cannot meaningfully change from what's seen in the show, meanwhile Jaune is unrecognizable as the awkward naive youth from the very first timeline.
• Sarcastic Confession: One of the main ways Jaune gets suspicion off himself, and deflects when his friends get on his case about his insufferable and incomprehensible behavior, is just to give them the real answer: he's a super badass and/or a time traveler. That's usually about the time they decide he isn't going to tell them the truth no matter how much they press, and concede the point so they can get on with their lives.
• Screw Destiny:
  • See the title. Jaune never ceases in his attempts to create the perfect ending for himself and his friends, even when it becomes clear that he is somehow destined to fail. In the finale, "Fate" finally gives up and gives him what he wanted.
  • Played for Laughs at one point. Not only does the Food Fight always happen in every loop, but just as a kick in the teeth, Jaune's team always loses it. Jaune, who by this point is sick and tired of this shit, decides no, not today, and tries to win as a symbolic, petty middle finger to the invisible force that's ruined his life.
• Screw Politeness, I'm a Senior!: Jaune is physically young but mentally extremely old and very abrasive at times. His reasons for acting this way: losing loved ones, having lived long enough to undergo a lot of trauma, general apathy from all that he's seen, and belief he won't have to live much longer with the consequences, lines up well with this trope.
• Secret-Keeper: Jaune starts to explain his circumstances to his friends, but gives up when it becomes clear they won't believe him. However, he's able to convince Weiss he's telling the truth, and he reveals his full story to her, the first time he's ever done so and succeeded. Even at the very end, she's the only one who knows.
• Self-Destructive Charge: By the time the Battle of Beacon is underway, Neo no longer cares about her own life and only wants to hurt Jaune the way he hurt her by killing Roman. She disengages from fighting the actual threats, Jaune and his father, leaving herself vulnerable in the process just so she can take some of his family down with her.
• Sex for Solace: In one loop, Weiss died at some point, and Jaune and Winter sought comfort in each other. He's on one hand smugly satisfied that he lived something Weiss dismisses as impossible, and on the other perfectly happy to not repeat it because the experience could never be worth the cost of his friend dying.
• Sex God: Jaune has had a lot of sex, with a lot of different women, and practice makes perfect. Not only is he very capable at sex in general, but he also knows the specific preferences of most of his partners through memorization alone. Despite his growing list of lovers being well known and regarded as distasteful, women continue to lay with him anyway because the experience is so good. This would have included Cinder, if not for him clearly snubbing her.
• Shameless Fanservice Guy: Jaune is barely embarrassed at all about sex or nudity. Being held at sword-point by terrorists while naked doesn't make him flinch. He does have his limits though — he's aware of the consequences of things he does and dreads them, he's bashful about his friends (especially Ruby) catching him mid-coitus, and finds it suitably awkward to have his team rub burn cream all over his upper body.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: Jaune Arc has spent over a thousand years stuck in a "Groundhog Day" Loop fighting and dying. When he's sent back over two years before Beacon, he's constantly tired, has a noticeable thousand yard stare, and accidentally hitting his younger sister when she surprised him, Jaune has no idea how he's supposed to comfort her, instead simply staring at her in confusion. Later chapters also show him suffering from night terrors and a Bar Brawl with Yang causes him to flashback to his previous death to Cinder.
• Shoot the Shaggy Dog: In the finale Jaune delivers his family to safety, helps Weiss defeat Cinder and personally kills Adam Taurus... only to die from the wounds, wake up in his bed for the nth time and suffer a mental breakdown. Luckily, the last chapter undoes the last part via some time manipulation.
• Shout-Out: Early in the story Jaune mentions that no matter what he did he never got the opportunity to sleep with Glynda Goodwitch, nor does he think it's an outcome he could manage. Guess he never tried being a teacher, because that's exactly what ends up happening in Professor Arc, one of the author's other stories.
• Sleepyhead: Jaune can, and does, fall asleep at any time in this loop. He speculates that it might be a habit he picked up in the last loop, of sleeping whenever possible because he never knew when the next opportunity would be, but gone out of control because he's not forced into action anymore. His family and friends have less fantastical and more pathological fears about his excessive sleeping habits, his parents sending him to doctors fearing hormone disorders and his friends suspecting it to be a symptom of depression. The latter might just be right.
  • Another reason, backed by Beacon's nurse, is that, contrary to Jaune's insistence that he knows the exact amount of food he needs to get the most out of his training, his body is actually using the excess sleep to compensate for a lack of fuel, indicating that this behavior would become less prominent were he to eat proper meals.
• Small Role, Big Impact:
  • As per canon, Amber Autumn. Jaune is never able to save her, either from Cinder's original attack or from being killed for the remainder of her power. However, thanks to Jaune being aware of how she was originally wounded, he's able to convince Weiss, the current Fall Maiden candidate, that he truly is a time traveller, and Weiss being let in on the secret allows her to take on Fate and make this loop the final one.
  • Pyrrha, especially compared to canon. Since she's Demoted to Extra here, one would expect that she doesn't matter much in the long term anymore, except for one crucial factor - Pyrrha being put on the same team as Ruby means that the Ozluminati decides against making her the Fall Maiden candidate in this loop. Instead, they bestow the role to Weiss, who not only handles the soul transfer better than Pyrrha ever did but also is able to take on Fate itself to stop the loops.
• Someone Has to Die: The Fall Maiden candidate needs to be killed by Cinder for Fate to be satisfied. After Weiss receives the power and learns about the nature of Jaune's repeats, she accepts this role, hoping that her friends will get to live.
• Spanner in the Works:
  • Jaune would have ran away from home immediately after resetting again, if not for his father coincidentally being out on a mission at the time, with Crocea Mors on him. By the time he gets back and Jaune has an opportunity to flee with the weapon, he's decided to stay with his family for this loop.
  • Though he doesn't realize it, Ozpin tends to screw over Jaune's plan to live out a loop in peace so he can have more time to prepare next loop.
  • Jaune comes close to getting himself expelled near the end of the first semester, but then Cardin's locker launch sends him to the Emerald Forest, where he has to fight off a pack of Grimm alone. He's caught on the same cameras that monitor the forest in Initiation, and the combat skill he revealed there convinces Ozpin to hold off. It's not much of a delay, but just long enough for the docks incident to happen, securing his continued enrollment.
  • Jaune's attemps to use his current loop as a means to live as long as possible (and thereby go back further when he dies) ends up being one for Fate's plan. When Jaune tries his damnedest to avoid going to Beacon, the powerful but not omnipotent Fate has to resort to increasingly unsubtle and improbable events to ensnare him, culminating in it manipulating both Yang and Ozpin to behave very out of character to coerce him into going. This, coupled by his attempts to get expelled from Beacon during his first semester, creates a chain of events, many of them entirely new despite a millennium of loops, that spirals out of Fate's control and ultimately gives Weiss the opening to convince it to relent.
• Spared By Adaptation: Jaune's main goal is to invoke this by recreating the original timeline but with all his friends getting to live. He succeeds in the current loop, as Pyrrha, Ozpin and presumably Penny all survive the Battle of Beacon. Oh, and Tukson might have got away alive too, though Jaune doesn't care to verify.
• The Spock: Jaune isn't unemotional, far from it, but he's been treating his life as a puzzle to be solved for over a millennium. Almost all of his decision-making is ruthlessly utilitarian, and he has trouble understanding other people's apparently illogical feelings (besides his seven friends who he understands intimately). His sister Coral is the same way, so they're some of the only people who can somewhat understand each other's thought processes.
• Spotting the Thread:
  • Weiss sees through Jaune's façade of apathy towards his team after her argument with Blake and the latter running away. He didn't actually stay for Blake's confession to being a faunus terrorist, but shows no surprise when Weiss talks to him about it, meaning he knew already and cares enough to keep it secret. She also realizes that if he was truly as uncaring as he presented himself, he would have given in to Yang's attempts to pressure him into looking for Blake, because cooperating would have been the path of least resistance.
  • Roman figures out Jaune is an imposter because he, however grudgingly, called him "sir" when prompted. According to Roman, no White Fang member would do that to a human criminal.
  • Cinder initially writes off Jaune's visible tension around her as not wanting to piss off his outspoken and territorial maybe-girlfriend, but realizes he knows they're villains when he reacts the same way to the disguised Neo, someone he has no reason to fear unless he knows who she is and the rest by extension.
• Starter Villain: Cardin, as per usual, makes himself the primary antagonist to Jaune in the first semester at Beacon. Not for the original reasons — he has no blackmail material here, and Jaune couldn't care less about his attempts at bullying — but he keeps being humiliated in spars with Jaune and escalating his retaliation. It's Cardin's actions that ruin Jaune's early efforts to burn bridges and feign weakness to get expelled. But the minute Jaune realizes that Cardin has made himself a real obstacle and won't stop, he deals with the problem, and Cardin is so rattled that he disappears from the rest of the story.
• Stations of the Canon: Invoked. Despite his best efforts, Jaune goes through the same events as he did in the original timeline, such as the initiation, trip to Forever Fall or the Breach, and with largely similar outcomes at that. Even the damn food fight, to his annoyance. Justified, since Fate is manipulating the events from the start in order to create a desirable scenario and those events are crucial for its desired outcome. Jaune has also learned over his many lives that changing too much alters the future beyond his ability to predict, as his enemies are intelligent and will adapt accordingly to counter his moves, thereby robbing him of the advantage his future knowledge provides. Therefore, his usual strategy is to make "minor" changes and focus on getting strong enough to ensure everyone survives the Stations of the Canon.
• Stepping Out for a Quick Cup of Coffee: As is his wont, Ozpin likes to have the rules bent rather than broken. When he catches Blake in his office trying to access the school's files on Jaune, he prods her into confessing why she's doing it and hands down a mild punishment... then pointedly announces he will step out and spend about ten minutes out grabbing the paperwork for said punishment, and all but tells her the password to access the info she wants.
• Suckiness Is Painful: Jaune's guitar solo is described as utterly horrifying and downright painful to listen to. Somewhat justified, as Jaune is actively trying to play awfully, as to annoy everybody present.
• Suggestive Collision: Blake thinks she has to protect Jaune on the train and tackles him away from the SDC droids' gunfire. As he is nude at the time, it takes her a supreme level of discipline to ignore that they landed with him... err, poking her in the cheek.
• Summon Bigger Fish:
  • Jaune "wins" his first infamous spar with Cardin by using his authority as his team's leader: ordering Yang to fight in his place. Goodwitch allows it, once. He resolves the scene of Cardin tormenting Velvet Scarletina the same way, by siccing Yang on him.
  • He later tries to stop Blake's Volume 2 White Fang obsession arc by making it clear that the authorities and licensed Huntsmen are dealing with the problem, so students like her shouldn't lose sleep over it. He does this by going to White Fang rallies Blake is about to investigate, and anonymously calling down Qrow Branwen to crash them.
• Sustained Misunderstanding: After nosily answering his scroll while he was away from it, Jaune's team gain the impression that he's engaged to a girl named Coral, which just makes them angrier at his habits than before. After he displays said habits in front of Coral, they can only bewilderedly assume they're in an open relationship, replacing their anger with awkwardness. They go the entire rest of the story without figuring out she's his sister, that the romance thing is just a joke between them, and that the youngest sister only told them he was engaged to try and pull him away from Beacon.
• Sympathy for the Hero: Fate appears to be at least somewhat regretful about killing Jaune over and over again. After it realizes that its plans can never be fulfilled, it gives Weiss and Jaune their happy ending, seemingly only from sympathy.
• Tactical Withdrawal: Besides just wanting a break to finally reconnect with his family for once, this is Jaune's reason for taking this life as a vacation. The longer he survives after Beacon's initiation day, the further back he resets, but by getting involved in Beacon he always invites death. He hopes to escape the fallout of Cinder's plans by staying away, hopefully gaining enough time in the next loop that he can finally win. Too bad The Call Knows Where You Live, and increasingly improbable events eventually force him into Beacon anyway.
• Tae Kwon Door: When he's forced to spar against Yang in class, this is Jaune's second tactic he tries (after fleeing through the spectator stands, and before throwing peoples' school bags). He leads her alongside the lockers by the side of the training hall, and slams the doors open to attack Yang and block her own strikes.
• Taught by Experience: Jaune has very little formal Huntsman training or education. He's basically repeated a single school year hundreds of times, and there's only so much you can squeeze out of that. Almost everything he knows, all those skills that make him an omnidisciplinary badass, he's learned 'on the job' or by being shown the ropes by his friends and enemies.
• Tell Me How You Fight: Jaune's fighting style combines recklessness with a number of underhanded tactics. It is also suited less for combating Grimm and more for fighting, or more specifically, killing people. Several characters pick up on this, drawing grim - and not entirely incorrect - conclusions about Jaune's nature. Oobleck makes the correct deduction that most of Jaune's tactics are done to close the gap against a superior enemy.
• There Are No Coincidences: After seeing the same events repeated so many times despite his best efforts, and how many of his peers from Beacon randomly show up in his life this loop, Jaune has come to believe that there is an intelligent force of some kind pulling the strings of his destiny rather than mere happenstance. He's proven right when Weiss communicates with Fate.
• There Are No Therapists: Averted. All of the teachers at Beacon possess at least some training in psychiatry should students need it.
• Think Nothing of It: Jaune has a habit of dismissing his heroic actions as nothing worthy of praise. It's a combination of having such a low opinion of himself that he genuinely thinks he doesn't deserve it because he'll just fail at the end, and fear of becoming invested in people again in a life that he sees as doomed from the start. Weiss snaps at him after one incident, the very incident that made her interested in romance with him.
  Jaune: Don't worry about it, Weiss, it was noth—
  Weiss: It was not nothing! It. Was. Not. Nothing. You are not nothing. What you did was not nothing. And I... I... I'd like to think I am not nothing to you either.
• Time-Travelers Are Spies: It's noted that Jaune's attempts to go to authority figures like Ozpin or Ironwood in previous loops just got him arrested on these grounds.
• Time Travel for Fun and Profit: Early in the current loop, Jaune makes some money betting on the adolescent fighting tournament circuit. He puts all his money on newcomer Pyrrha Nikos. He's tried things like playing the lottery in the past, but his experience is that random elements are unpredictable while deliberately controlled elements (like Pyrrha being unbeatably good) are consistent. Betting on Pyrrha also has diminishing returns, since as she builds up her streak the payouts get smaller.
• Title Drop: The titular line gets used by Jaune, as it becomes increasingly clear that all his Beacon classmates falling into his life is no coincidence, and he refuses to play along. It's used again by Weiss in the final chapter, just as she is about to enact her plan to defy Fate and save Jaune.
• Took a Level in Cynic: Centuries of failure has caused Jaune to take a couple dozen of these. By the time the story starts, he has no hope of saving his friends as it will happen eventually, after gods know how much more pain and strife; not that it makes him any less determined to save them.
• Too Unhappy to Be Hungry: Jaune hasn't been able to enjoy food for quite some time. In his lives where he trained as much as possible, he ate as much as he needed to support that training, but this current life was supposed to be a break. As such his appetite shrank right down; by his own admission he only eats enough to not deal with hunger pangs. He could get away with this early because of his inactivity, but becoming active at Beacon quickly leads to malnourishment when his diet stays the same.
• Training from Hell: After this long, Jaune is acutely familiar with his own physical limitations, and knows exactly how to push them most efficiently. Some lives of his were spent doing nothing but this perfect training for as long as possible, hoping to make himself strong enough to protect all his friends. So far he hasn't managed to train enough to succeed.
• Trauma Button: Jaune snaps and flies into a berserker rage at the docks when Blake unknowingly quotes her own last words to him.
• Troll: Jaune repeatedly uses his foreknowledge and experience to mess with people around him. Sometimes it serves some hidden purpose, like appearing less dangerous in their eyes or avoiding a difficult topic in a conversation, but he just as often trolls people for the sake of it.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: As far as his family can tell, Jaune's personality suddenly changed completely on the day he reset back to, going from an awkward bumbling adolescent to what they compare to an old veteran. He acts blasé towards his brushes with death and seeks out dozens of older women to sleep with. Though they still love him dearly, they are all deeply worried that something is truly wrong with Jaune that they can't help with. They don't know the half of it...
• True Companions: His seven friends are the main reason Jaune has chosen to go through all the suffering he has. Especially Ruby; Jaune muses at one point that no matter what, in every single loop where he goes anywhere near her, she always finds a way to become his friend. This even includes times when he'd worked for the villains — she always saw something in him and tried to 'turn him good', a courtesy no other villain got.
• Truth Serum: Given by Torchwick to Jaune at Mountain Glenn to finally get the answers he wants about who this pain-in-the-ass kid is and why he knows what he knows. In reality, it isn't actually "truth serum", it's just the euphemism the White Fang likes to use for pumping drugs into someone until they become nice and suggestible... or die, whichever comes first. Regardless, it works and he spills his guts, but Torchwick takes those secrets to his grave.
• Truth in Television: Jaune's sex addiction is pretty realistic. He seeks out sex so much as a poor coping habit. He doesn't even feel much attraction anymore and just wants the high of orgasm.
• The Unchosen One: Fittingly for a story about subverting fate, Weiss manages to not only take Pyrrha's role as a Fall Maiden candidate, but also manages to kill Cinder - something that the embodiment of destiny desperately tried to prevent her from doing. Similarly, it's Weiss who finally ends the loops and resolves the plot, rather than Jaune, whose role in the future was vital and irreplaceable according to Fate itself.
• Underestimating Badassery: A number of characters severely underestimate Jaune's abilities. Some of them, like Cardin, are Entertainingly Wrong due to not knowing how skilled he is. Others, like the White Fang mooks who don't bother to restrain Jaune after kidnapping and drugging him border on being Too Dumb to Live.
• Undying Loyalty: This is the one weak point in Jaune's Jerkass facade. He simply won't abandon his friends, not in the long run, nor the short one. In the end, they are the reason he is still going after all the torment he's been through.
• The Unfettered: Jaune aims to defeat Cinder and save his friends. Everything and everyone else, including Jaune himself, may be sacrificed for that purpose if need be and giving up is simply not an option.
• Unscrupulous Hero: Throughout the many repeats, Jaune has used many questionable to downright despicable means to try and save Beacon and his friends, some of which include threatening to execute Melanie, planting a bomb in Cinder's room in Beacon, and trying to have Atlas declare martial law.
• Unstoppable Rage: Jaune, when pushed too far in battle, usually against the bad guys, goes completely berserk. The narrator even says that his vision turns red. Torchwick at one point compares him to a berserker.
• Villain Has a Point: While it does little to justify his actions, Adam makes a fair point about Jaune not being much better than him. He also gets Jaune to reluctantly agree that Blake is something of a Karma Houdini after all the crimes she has committed.
• Weak, but Skilled: In his most recent incarnation Jaune has about a thousand years of combat experience but very little physical training, which puts him somewhere around the level of his teammates once he gets aura. Before getting aura, he's able to kill a Beowolf by himself and without a real weapon, something that's historically unheard of and attracts Ozpin's attention. Exaggerated when his aura stops working, making him vulnerable to dying from a single hit.
• Weaksauce Weakness: After all he's been through and what he can now stomach, Jaune's kind of annoyed that he still suffers from motion sickness in vehicles, especially in the air. At the very least, when he's the one driving or he's performing battlefield surgery or delivering a baby he has no issues, so he's narrowed it down to a matter of keeping his mind off the nausea.
• Wham Line: At the end of chapter 46, Weiss makes a request to Jaune:
  Let me die.
• What If?: ...Jaune died after the Fall of Beacon, somehow got mentally sent back to before it happened, and continues to get sent back each time he dies?
  • With his foreknowledge, effective Save Scumming and motivation to try everything, Jaune has been able to invoke this in past loops by making specific changes to see what happens. Some choice anecdotes include:
    • Yang gets arrested from her canon bar brawl? She gets sent to prison, then commits suicide after hearing that Ruby dies in the fall of Vale. Jaune gets implicated along with her this time around, and he can't bear to let that scenario repeat, so he cooperates with Ozpin's deal to get him in Beacon to keep them both out of prison.
    • Jaune simply kills Cinder, Mercury, and Emerald by bombing their room? Adam gets let off the leash and goes on a rampage in Vale that kills just as many people (if not more) than the Fall of Beacon. He's stopped trying anything like that a long time ago, because he knows from experience that things will rapidly grow outside of his control and end up worse.
    • Circumstances put Ruby and Blake on different teams? Blake still crashes the docks heist, but because Ruby isn't one of the ones combing Vale to find her, Penny doesn't get involved, and without her intervention, Torchwick and the White Fang kill Blake there. Whenever teams end up that way, Jaune's learned to make it a point to trigger a meeting with Penny to secure Blake's survival... but he's so preoccupied with doing nothing this time that he forgets, and Blake almost pays the price.
  • This current loop he's got a totally different plan: what if Jaune did all of the above, but then decided to try staying out of trouble once? As it turns out, the overall answer is "It doesn't work because the thing that put him in this situation to begin with won't let it", but some of the major impacts from Jaune being incredibly different include:
    • Roman is normally supposed to be taken alive after the Breach, then busted out to ruin Atlas's forces from the inside. But this time Jaune kills him at the Breach. Without him there, the Battle of Beacon progresses with Atlas keeping air support and their robots helping the defense. There being less enemies and more allies, the students are able to band together and kill the Grimm Dragon, saving the school.
    • The different circumstances of Jaune's capture at Mountain Glenn rather than Ruby's (for one thing, there's no Paladins) cause the team's Huntsman chaperone to fight Neo instead of Yang. Thus Yang doesn't use up her 'one save' from Raven until later during the Battle of Beacon.
    • A crucial and unprecedented change happens this loop: Ruby and Pyrrha are put on the same team. To avoid putting all their eggs in one basket, and to avoid Ruby's Silver Eyes weakening the Fall Maiden's power, the conspiracy chooses Weiss to fuse with the Maiden instead of Pyrrha in spite of the concerns over Weiss' family connections. Weiss has more identity trouble with the Maiden's memories than Pyrrha ever seemed to, which becomes the main reason she believes Jaune when he confesses his true nature to her. Finally having an ally that understands his circumstances and goals is the biggest asset that makes this loop the last one, allowing Weiss to snatch victory when Fate forces Jaune himself to fail.
• Why Won't You Die?: Jaune just won't stay down after flying into a rage. At the docks, Roman's cool demeanor doesn't last long when faced with his fury, and he yells this trope when Jaune keeps going even while getting a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown.
• Wild Card: Ozpin sees Jaune as such, failing to make any sense of his actions. In reality, Jaune is driven by Undying Loyalty to his friends and is therefore anything but this trope. He just knows a lot of things he shouldn't, and acts on them a lot.
• Worf Had the Flu:
  • Jaune would have put up a better fight against Yang at The Club, maybe even had the advantage slightly, if not for being so drunk that he'd just been cut off by Junior. Even then, he's on the losing end but doesn't let her go unscathed. It's also heavily implied that Fate itself forced him into the intoxicated state to ensure he would end up in Beacon.
  • He later needs to resort to trickery (as opposed to choosing to do so to hide his ability) to beat Sun in a spar. Ordinarily Jaune could trounce him, but at the time he's suffering from exhaustion and sleep deprivation, recovering from hypothermia, and his Aura is consistently failing to protect him from injury.
• Write Who You Know: In-Universe. Coral Arc writes dirty fiction, and in this loop she taps the experience of her Loveable Sex Maniac little brother for scenario ideas and to keep it as authentic as possible. She sends a notebook with Jaune when he goes to Beacon so he can fill it with material she can use. And that's when she's not just writing a blatant insert of him as an Uke to annoy him.
• You Cannot Grasp the True Form: Fate is presented as an alien and incomprenhesible entity which isn't even capable of assuming A Form You Are Comfortable With. When it "talks" with Weiss, it is unable to engage in a verbal conversation and telepathically conveys its emotions instead.
• You Can't Fight Fate:
  • When Jaune decides to not enter Beacon for once, over the next two years he runs into every member of Teams RWBY, CRDL, CVFY, JNPR, Ozpin, Glynda, and Emerald. Eventually he's forced to enroll to spare Yang and himself from several years in prison.
  • This is actually the premise of the entire story. The loops are happening because Fate itself is trying to get a specific outcome. Jaune just keeps respawning because he thinks he's supposed to stop Cinder when that isn't what Fate wants. Surprisingly, it eventually gives in and allows the characters to have the outcome they want instead.
• You Can't Thwart Stage One: Jaune knows about the ambush on the Fall Maiden, including the details of executing it, because one of his ideas to end the loops was to save her before school even started. That just ended up being another thing he would always fail at, but the knowledge he gained by trying ends up being vital to his ultimate success.

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