Fanfic / The Eternal Crown

Art by GWBrex

Salem won. Defeated and captured, Ozma was driven into insanity, never to rise against her again. For a thousand years Remnant has lived under the rule of the Eternal Queen, shaped to her whims. Jaune Arc is but a young man suffering from nightmares that aren't his own; driven to fulfil a destiny that isn't his, before the fractured mind of a broken man consumes him entirely.

— FanFiction.Net summary

The Eternal Crown is a RWBY Alternate Universe Fic written by Coeur Al'Aran. The fic was completed on December 10, 2023.

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Tropes are:

• Adaptational Attractiveness: When we first see Salem in the flesh, her description matches her original human appearance rather than the monstrous form she took after being afflicted with Grimm essence. As the only character who knows different is an unstable shell of a mind, no explanation is offered for a long time. Eventually, it's revealed that she learned how to hide her Grimm appearance and abilities through her magic and can switch between the two states with a little effort.
• Adaptational Badass: Ozma is depicted with abilities at a scale greater than he could demonstrate in canon, such as Teleportation. An author's note elaborates that the Maidens don't exist in this continuity (and there's no mention of other magic gifts like the Branwen siblings' bird forms), so we're seeing an Ozma who still has the majority of his power, the kind of power that made him an invincible hero even in a world where everyone had magic.
• Adaptational Jerkass: Yang grew up in the bandit tribe with only Raven as a parent. By Qrow's admission she has a soft spot for small, cute things but otherwise she has no problem thriving in the cutthroat brutality the rest of the tribe engages in.
• Adaptational Heroism: Played with. The White Fang in Eternal Crown aren't a protest-group turned terrorist cell, but rather a mercenary company looking to reclaim Menagerie, their ancestral homeland. So they're probably more gritty and amoral in their day to day lives than peaceful protestors politely asking for social reform, but at the same time they're not committing crimes against innocent people out of racial hatred.
• Adaptational Superpower Change: The power of Aura has apparently developed into something different than the way it was seen in the show, which was enhancing users' strength and blocking attacks along with fueling one specific ability that was mostly unique to each person. The baseline or teachable powers of Aura users are here shown to be more varied by comparison — for example, Jaune's canon ability to boost others' Aura with his own to effectively heal their wounds is shown to be possible for anyone to learn and use in a limited form. Others possess spellcasting resembling real magic that was limited to a handful of individuals in the show, albeit much smaller in scope, as it's trying to imitate a result with a fraction of the power behind it.
• Adaptational Villainy:
  • Affable or not, any Huntress in this fic is an enforcer of the villain's cult of personality and a tool by which she maintains her grip on the world. So far we have Pyrrha and Winter who are heroes in canon but working for Salem here, along with Summer Rose, though it seems at the end of her days there was something in the Huntress life she wasn't okay with.
  • The Schnee in canon were a corporation that had recently become infamous for scummy business practices, headed by an emotionally manipulative Slimeball. Here they are the family placed in charge of ruling Mistral after the latter's rebellion, and have turned the nation into an oppressive hellscape, exploiting and killing its citizens without a care. Willow, whose worst crime in canon was being too lost in her depression to protect her children from their abuser, is here a megalomaniac, genocidal zealot and the one doing the abusing.
• Adaptational Wimp:
  • Aura is much less widespread in this fic, so several characters implicitly lack superhuman abilities that they would have in canon or other fics. In particular, Nicholas Arc is the village's best hunter and a capable warrior, but he's just a normal man rather than a superpowered veteran Huntsman, and a small group of Grimm is dangerous enough that Jaune needs Ozma to intervene and save him.
  • Ozma alludes at a few points that he isn't impressed with the Chosen whom have canon counterparts, and suggests they are poorly trained under Salem to keep them dependent on her. Winter Schnee in canon was a capable military operative who should have no problem beating a relative amateur like Jaune, and while she's clearly stronger in melee here, it's not by enough that he can't turn the tables and put her on the losing end with his clumsy magic. Considering how Winter is supposed to be extremely strong for a Huntress, it doesn't speak well of how the average one stacks up.
• Adaptation Name Change: Kind of. In canon, the reincarnating hero is pretty consistently called Ozpin, the latest identity he had assumed at the time he was introduced, even by people who have some idea of his true nature or know his original name. The man Ozpin is nowhere to be found here since he's long dead, but he doesn't even get a Legacy Character like the rest of the main cast, so the immortal spirit is primarily known by his original name Ozma rather than any specific identity he temporarily inhabits.
• Affably Evil: The way one old woman tells it, in her youth the Dark Lord appeared to be charismatic, persuasive, and more of a freedom-fighter than anything else. Jaune has a hard time reconciling that with the common understanding that he's some kind of evil demon bent on wiping out humanity. Of course, readers familiar with RWBY will have some idea what the true answer is: that at worst he's a good man deliberately Driven to Madness by the real evil.
• Alas, Poor Villain: After killing Winter, Ozma sadly notes she had no choice in her indoctrination and she might have been a great woman in a different world.
• All of the Other Reindeer: Jaune's lifelong, grisly nightmares have given his hometown the impression that he's "cursed", and most of them keep their distance in fear that he might pass on the taint to them.
• Aloof Leader, Affable Subordinate: Cinder takes the lead when dealing with the people of Ansel, giving orders and performing the tests to identify potential huntresses herself, and is standoffish and uncompromising at best. Pyrrha, meanwhile, defers to Cinder but offers sympathy to the chosen girl and to Jaune for the trouble of being scrutinized by the huntresses, and has no problem chatting with the townsfolk or showing off a little of her powers to curious children.
• Alternate Universe Fic: The set-up is that long before RWBY's present time when all the characters we know are alive, Salem took over the world and remade it in her own image as a Medieval Stasis world where she's worshipped as a goddess; because she realized millennia ago that she could lastingly cripple Ozma by torturing his mind into complete insanity which rendered him incapable of opposing her, which carried with his soul across all his subsequent reincarnations. Except, it turns out that this isn't an alternate version of Remnant's present at all: the events depicted in canon so far came and went millennia ago before Salem broke Ozma, and all the alternate versions of Jaune, the Schnees, Pyrrha, the Roses and other characters in this story are reincarnations of the long-dead canon versions.
• Armor Is Useless: Zig-Zagged. Armor and shields are almost worthless used by regular people against Grimm, because their bestial strength is so much higher than a person's. Standard procedure for fighting Grimm is a weapon big enough to damage the massive creatures, trying not to get hit at all, and praying. But the majority of people, and all men, have no other means of protecting their bodies from harm, and armor — whether an expensive full suit of plate or a few key pieces — makes a world of difference when fighting other humans. The majority of the stronger competitors in the Spring Tournament melee are fully armored knights representing noble houses, which makes it a lot less simple for Jaune to beat them even relying on Ozma's experience.
• Awful Truth: Using the last question from Jinn for this century, Jaune exposes to the people of Menagerie and the members of the Church of Salem (along with a few Chosen) the truth of the Fall of Menagerie: long ago, Salem heard of how the women of the island had begun to learn to harness the power of Aura, and had requested an academy be built to help teach them how to better wield it. In a fit of paranoia, she believes that Ozma was beginning to do his work at rebuilding the world of the past; unwilling to allow any threat to her rule, she (in her true, Grimm-like form) commanded the Grimm to ravage and destroy the settlement and leave no survivors, even to kill her own Chosen present, and chase them off the island. By the time Jinn's vision stops being shown to all present, the entirety of the faunus who have reclaimed Menagerie are left furious and in shock that their so-called "goddess" chased them from their homeland, while the people of the Church, Pyrrha and Coco are left shocked, horrified and/or broken at the revelation that Salem is in fact a cruel monster that controls the very beasts they swore to defend the people from.
• Batman Gambit: Salem, above all else, is a creature of habit, and has had thousands of years to solidify those habits. Jaune realizes that hunkering down on Menagerie is untenable because Salem will just gather an army of Grimm and wipe the island out again. Ruby suggests leaving the defensible island to attack Salem's territory, because she's concerned mostly with him and not the island, and attacking her is the thing that all the previous Dark Lords have tried to do. Bringing things back to business as usual might calm Salem from taking drastic action, get her to leave Menagerie alone, and make her at least briefly more predictable. Sure enough, once the army lands and Salem hears, she's convinced he's gone mad again and she can make do with her normal tactics because he's no longer a real threat...only to then have Jaune and his forces begin to turn the tide against her. Unfortunately, it works a little too well; presented with the possibility of actually losing after having been caught unaware, she begins to destroy all the kingdoms to deny Ozma victory.
• Belief Makes You Stupid: Weiss is frustrated that her sister Winter, who was always a thoughtful and sharp woman, was sent to learn closer to the Church's seat of power, and now is nothing but an empty-headed zealot who believes she doesn't need to think or make decisions when the Goddess does that for her. This turns out to be a systemic issue — on the one hand, there are the fully faithful of the Chosen who uncritically believe everything Salem proclaims because her word is infallible, and on the other, there are the ones who still have their own intelligence and can tell when Salem's words are flawed, but ignore their own better judgment because they know they're supposed to.
• Born Winner: Winter, a Huntress Superior who no doubt has done her share of recruitment work, is taken aback by how much Aura potential she senses in Ruby.
• Broken Pedestal: In Chapter 56, all present are made to face the fact that their beloved Goddess is a monstrous, murderous fraud. The White Fang settlers in Menagerie and the arrived delegation from the Church are shown in explicit, undeniable detail by Jinn that Salem is master of the Grimm, and used them to wipe out old Menagerie because they'd begun to unravel the lies she'd told everyone about the world. The crowd is variously furious, disgusted, and despairing, and within a few days none of them have any shred of faith left.
• Bullying a Dragon:
  • One of Jaune's neighbors gets the bright idea to accuse him of being possessed not only in the presence of two huntresses, but also of his father. Once Cinder confirms that Jaune actually isn't possessed, the result is inevitable.
  • Mayor Cobbin spells this out to the assembled mob of villagers when they come braying for Jaune's blood. Putting aside all the (incorrect) reasons he cites why none of them should be suspecting Jaune for what they saw, the most truthful thing he says is that if he were the Dark Lord, then a mob with pitchforks and torches is not going to win that fight. He draws attention to this to show them how they aren't acting on logic and make them second-guess the rest of the matter.
• The Caligula: Willow Schnee rules both Mistral and her family with an iron fist and wanton cruelty.
• Cassandra Truth: For all that it's a betrayal (and more complicated than the official wisdom would have one believe), Tulle is actually correct that Jaune is possessed by the Dark Lord and the Huntresses are supposed to take him away. After Jaune publicly passes their test and 'proves' he is clean, most of the rest of the village accept that, but Tulle and a few of his ilk still proclaim that he's a cursed child and blame him for any misfortune, real or imagined.
• Les Collaborateurs: The Schnee Deterrence Corps are filled with recruits from Mistral, the very nation they are responsible for oppressing. This is to try and turn the more resentful, less compliant citizens to a purpose that benefits the government, keep Mistral divided and distrustful of one-another, and ensure the first line of defense against future rebellion is the 'expendable heretics' rather than the 'true faithful'.
• Conveniently Unverifiable Cover Story: Ruby and Taiyang come seeking refuge in Ansel, the latter injured, claiming that their home island village of Patch has been wiped out by Grimm. There's no easy way to confirm this as the winter and Grimm make travel treacherous. Once the cold recedes, Patch will be shown to still be standing. Ruby was Chosen by visiting Huntresses and fled rather than be taken, her father coming with her. His injuries came shortly before they arrived at Ansel's gates at the hands of the same Grimm that had lately been lurking around the outskirts.
• Cover-Blowing Superpower: Cinder's idea of testing whether Jaune is truly "cursed" like the villagers fear is to slash his cheek without warning, clearly hoping that if he had aura it would block or heal it. Jaune hasn't gotten to the point where Ozma can do anything for himself, so he is injured as normal and Cinder accepts that as proof he is clean. He unexpectedly uses aura to save himself when he and the huntresses are attacked by Ursa, but narrowly avoids this trope by playing it off as a near-miss rather than a blocked hit that should have killed him. After he saves his family from more Grimm in front of most of the town, his cover is blown. Cobbin is able to shame the resulting angry mob and dismiss it as hysterical strength, but everyone knows it's only a temporary measure until the townsfolk see through the blatant lies, work up the nerve to riot again, or call the Huntresses back. As such, Jaune needs to flee Ansel for his own and his family's safety.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • While the Muggles are having their own tournament, the Goddess's Chosen (disallowed from competing in interests of fairness) have their own private contest. In the most recent one, Cinder won the right to challenge a Huntress Superior, picking Winter. The way Pyrrha tells it, Winter won "effortlessly".
  • Ozma demonstrates a degree of his full power by fighting Weiss and the Malachite twins at the same time, and taking them apart while barely trying.
• Didn't See That Coming: There's not a chance in hell that Ruby could escape her escorts of Huntresses if they actually tried to stop her. She manages this not once, but twice, simply because her wanting to escape at all is unthinkable to the Goddess's devotees and their negligence made them easy for her to hoodwink.
• Dies Differently in Adaptation: This version of Summer fell ill, passed in the company of loved ones begging Ruby not to become a Huntress like she had, and was buried not far from her home.
• Dirty Cop: The Schnee Deterrence Corps are effectively Mistral's police force, and enforce the Schnee's totalitarian punitive law on the common folk. The fact that abuses of authority (including theft, violence, and sexual assault) by the SDC are ignored and tacitly encouraged is one of the main selling points for recruitment, as it attracts people resentful of their oppressed circumstances who are willing to betray their own people for a shred of power. They are essentially roving bands of thugs with the weight of a government behind their sadism.
• Do with Him as You Will: After Cinder confirms that Jaune isn't possessed by Ozma, she leaves the fate of the man who sold him out into Nicholas Arc's hands. Naturally, Nicholas beats the shit out of him.
• Downer Beginning: The very first scene is a man, already in bad shape from captivity, being tortured for the explicit purpose of breaking his mind forever. Said man is an incarnation of Ozma.
• Dramatic Irony: Much of the story is steeped in suspense and intrigue that wouldn't necessarily be present as written. Because it's an alternate universe adaptation, the reader likely knows exactly how the setting is 'supposed' to be, can spot where things are different and how, and can figure out the truth of things long before any of the characters can. It's only in Chapter 50 that the true nature of Salem is vaguely alluded to, much less revealed in full, when that's basic foundational knowledge for the fic's premise.
• Dreaming Of Things Gone By: Jaune's nightmares are the memories of Ozma, seemingly slipping through the cracks of his broken psyche.
• Driven to Madness: This was inflicted on Ozma by Salem some time in the past, as an attempt to deal with him permanently when simply killing him would not do the trick. By the time Jaune inherits the mantle, the lucid old hero is nowhere to be found. Rather than a coherent intelligence sharing his head, Jaune only hears Ozma through rare, vague whispers at the periphery of his consciousness, and can barely get his attention otherwise.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Raven is a remorseless bandit, but if she makes a deal with someone, she intends to honor it whether or not her side of the deal works out.
• Eye Scream: Weiss takes out Ren during their battle by cutting his eyes out with her rapier.
• False Flag Operation: Salem has covered up her own connection to the Grimm, and the understanding is that if anyone can control the Grimm, it's the Dark Lord. After the first ill-fated assault on the new Menagerie, the nations' peoples protest against continuing the war and losing more lives, saying that if Ozma and the heretics want to hide away on his island away from the good folk then they should let them. Salem publicly agreed... but shortly after sent an army of Grimm to attack Atlas, blaming it on Ozma and saying the similar slaughter that wiped out Mistral was his doing as well. Now the two remaining nations (plus one damaged one) are fully supportive of hunting him down whatever the cost.
• Fighting for a Homeland: The island of Menagerie is said to be the ancestral and primary home of faunus, only to have been beset by Grimm three hundred years ago and have its inhabitants forced to flee to the other continents. Attempts by the Eternity Queen's forces to reclaim the isle were unsuccessful, and eventually the Grimm gathered enough to make any further attacks pointless. By the present there exists a faunus mercenary band named the White Fang, who have ambitions of getting strong enough one day to take back their home.
• Foreshadowing: A tangible hint that this fic takes place in the far future of canon rather than an alternate history is the description of Menagerie. Faunus describe it as their ancestral home and long to return to it after it fell hundreds of years ago. Readers familiar with RWBY know that Menagerie was a ghetto island they were given as dubious spoils after a recent world war, and all-but-forced to relocate to by other nations' discrimination. Neither of those events should have happened if Salem controlled the world for thousands of years beforehand, so there should be no logical reason for faunus to be associated with the island, but they are, and the conclusion is that they did happen, Salem taking control happened afterward, and the historical reasons for that association were lost over time.
• For Want Of A Nail:
  • At some point, this version of Salem decided to neutralize Ozma once and for all by destroying his mind rather than his body. Without him working against her, she was able to rebuild her position as queen and now effectively controls the world; the result is that humanity is subservient to her, only women she chooses are capable of wielding Aura, and society in general has barely progressed past when she first took power.
  • The true inciting incident for the story is that at humanity's height, as seen in the show, dwindling Dust supplies could not sustain the technology that kept civilization safe. When it ran out, Salem took advantage of the crisis to break everything down, inflict the above on Ozma, and deliberately reverse their roles making her the beloved hero and him the hated outcast.
• Framing the Guilty Party: Cobbin's plan to cover for Jaune's escape from Ansel is to claim that Tulle drove him away, framing Jaune as entirely innocent in the matter and continuing to heap the anger of the townsfolk on to Tulle instead. Tulle is the reason why Jaune has to flee, but it covers for the fact that he was right.
• I Gave My Word: Raven tells Jaune that, in order to participate in a fighting tournament in the capital of Vale, she's made a deal with a nearby village for them to claim them as their own in exchange for profit and not being attacked. When Jaune asks if she intends to hold up her side of the deal, she says yes without hesitation, even if it doesn't work out for her.
• Gender-Restricted Ability: Only women, and only some women at that, are known to be capable of the "soul magic" used by Huntresses. If you've seen RWBY, you'll know this is false, and an author's note elaborates: Salem has deliberately presented Aura as a female-only power and tightly controls it so that the only man who knows different is Ozma, giving him away when a man appears who has it. Later on, when Ren is blinded in combat, Ozma offers to teach him Aura as an apprentice so that he can learn a replacement for his lost sight. The conventional dogma on the subject means just about everyone is apprehensive about whether that's even possible or if he'd in truth be infecting Ren with his own evil, but he proves them wrong.
• A God Am I:
  • Salem has now styled herself as "Goddess-Queen" and her people now invoke her identity in phrases.
  • Willow is careful not to claim the same herself, especially around those who work directly with Salem. But having been personally selected by the Goddess to deliver her will upon rebellious Mistral however she sees fit, she considers herself to be the next best thing to divine.
• God Guise: Occasionally, a man will actually claim to be the Dark Lord in order to make themselves more intimidating. One General Lagune was a high-profile case where he made the claim to his soldiers, further boasting that he had control of Ozma's power and would use it to bring them victory. Usually it does not last long, as Huntresses have no choice but to find and verify the claims themselves.
• Green-Eyed Monster: Tulle is implied to be motivated in his hatred for Jaune and Nicholas by the fact that he once had a crush on Juniper and didn't take it well when she married an outsider instead.
• Healing Hands: Pyrrha can apparently use her own aura to heal others' minor wounds with a touch. Jaune uses the same ability tapping into Ozma's knowledge to save Nicholas's life on his last day in Ansel.
• Hearing Voices: Even awake, when he's stressed Jaune can hear the same words from his dreams.
• Heel–Face Turn: After having their faith shattered, many of the Church expedition to Menagerie, including Pyrrha and Coco, make the choice to defect from Salem and join Jaune's faction against her.
• Hero with Bad Publicity: By the present, the only knowledge of Ozma is as a vague Satan-figure called the Dark Lord, an ancient enemy of Queen Salem who she stopped from destroying all of humanity in the past. Now, according to folklore, he tries to rise again by possessing the bodies of men, driving them to madness in the process.
• Hide Your Otherness: Nicholas urges Jaune to stay away from the incoming delegation from Vale, and especially not to talk about his nightmares, as similar delegations have been known to target those who are similarly troubled. He's right to be wary, as the very purpose of huntresses is to hunt the exact affliction Jaune has.
• Hope Spot:
  • The arrival of the huntresses causes Jaune some stress, but he walks away from the encounter with public evidence that maybe, just maybe, there's nothing wrong with him after all and the rest of the village will stop treating him like he's a literal devil in hiding. That lasts about a day, only for him to unknowingly activate aura while out guiding the huntresses in the wilderness and seemingly confirm that he is the Dark Lord, even if he does manage to keep the huntresses from immediately cottoning on.
  • Jaune is on the cusp of getting away clean after the Spring Tournament, with no one the wiser about his true nature. But right as he's claiming his prize, Ozma hijacks his body and makes a public spectacle of attacking Salem, making sure in the process that everyone can see his face and identity.
• Hypocrite: Cardin Winchester dismisses Jaune and his party for ganging up on him in the tournament qualifiers, yet was just in the process of cornering him alone in the middle of the night with his own posse in a thinly-disguised revenge attempt before being caught and backing down.
• In Spite of a Nail: Just about everything in the whole world is different this time around... and yet Pyrrha still seems to nurse a crush on Jaune, albeit for different reasons.
• I Owe You My Life:
  • Nicholas saved Cobbin's life from Grimm at some point in the past, which is why the two are such good friends now and why Cobbin always looks out for his family. It's also why he helps Jaune flee the village once things go too far, as he owes it to the man who saved him to protect his children as much as he can.
  • Taiyang later helps Jaune for a similar reason, as without Jaune's medical knowledge created by the Dark Lord, he would've died from his injuries.
• Killed Off for Real:
  • During her fight against Jaune, Winter ends up losing her life after he's forced to kill her in self-defense.
  • Because of Willow ordering the genocide of the people of Mistral, An Ren is believed to be among the dead, having been Killed Offscreen.
  • In the siege of Mistral, Willow is ultimately slain by Weiss' hands.
  • Once the war against Salem begins in earnest, Sienna and Adam end up slain by the Church's forces, with Adam dying to protect Jaune while disguised as him.
• Legacy Character: Just about every named character is not an alternate timeline counterpart, they are a second version of the same character that appeared thousands of years ago when the setting was similar to canon. A second Jaune, a second Ruby, a second Yang, and so on. Not even Ozma understands how this is the case — the best guess he can come up with is that the conflict has been going on for so long that dead human souls have started to loop back around and be born again.
• Magic Is a Monster Magnet: The presence of aura is one thing that attracts the Creatures of Grimm. With aura itself being more tightly rationed than canon, an unusual concentration of Grimm is one clue that a host of Ozma may be in the vicinity. One of Nicholas's points of distrust for the visiting huntresses is that their mere presence is likely to put the village in more danger for the near future.
• Major Injury Underreaction: Salem is immortal, so naturally, she doesn't need to be concerned with harm no matter how gruesome. When Ozma uses Jaune's body to carve open her stomach and run her through, her only reaction (still impaled) is to gently greet him like an old acquaintance.
• Medieval Stasis: Remnant under the rule of Salem has seemingly not advanced much further than it had when Ozma still ruled alongside her. It's actually more complicated than that. The current status quo only came to be after humanity advanced steadily to the technology level seen in the show, only to suffer an energy crisis when Dust ran out and have it all torn down by Salem afterwards. Once she emerged as a supposed savior and rebuilt the world to her liking, she imposed stasis on humanity to keep them weak.
• Moment of Lucidity: Most of Jaune's interaction with Ozma consists of nightmares, flashbacks of memory, emotional impulses, and the occasional mad whisper in his head. As he grows used to having him around (such as he is), there are moments where Ozma manages to focus enough to have an actual conversation, though he's always back to silence and muttering before long. Partway into the Spring Tournaments, these flashes of sanity become more common. After a while of engaging with him and staying away from Salem, Ozma becomes about as responsive and cognizant as he was in canon.
• My Greatest Failure: Ozma is thoroughly contrite when it comes to Mistral. A few incarnations ago, he whipped up Mistral into a rebellion, and had a real if slim chance of fighting back against Salem. However, at a crucial moment he lost grip on his sanity and led them into a suicidal battle where the rebellion was wiped out. Nowadays the nation lives under oppressive, violent tyranny as an explicit punishment for following the Dark Lord, and he sees himself and his own mental weakness as responsible for that suffering.
• Papa Wolf: One of the villagers, Tulle, sells Jaune out to the huntresses from Vale. His dad Nicholas is seconds from knifing said huntresses (or rather dying trying) before Jaune stops him. After the tension has passed, Nicholas stalks over to the offending man and lays into him with fists.
• Past-Life Memories: With an ancient, though broken, intelligence in his head, Jaune constantly finds his thinking compromised by inexplicable impulses, knowledge, and strong opinions that make no sense for him to have considering his background.
  • In the first chapter, Jaune finds himself wanting to habitually lean on his training sword like a cane, is more comfortable wielding it in one hand when all logic dictates it's too heavy for that, and reflexively performs a move that would be suicidal with real deadly weapons but would make sense if he had a way to protect himself from injury.
  • Later on, he completely subconsciously uses medical knowledge that he shouldn't know to save a man who, as even his own daughter admits, should've died from his wounds.
• Persecution Flip: To a degree. The standard medieval fantasy favoring of men in most circumstances is complicated by the fact that the divine ruler and monarch is a woman and (supposedly) only women can have religiously significant superpowers. This means that women have a cultural and political importance that men don't have an answer to, and some things that historically would have been mostly for men (like inheritance and the active role in courtship) are often given to women instead. And just as some women would have been unsatisfied with the life they were given, here it's suggested that some men are resentful of being culturally sidelined.
• Pet the Dog: Cinder is a servant of the “Goddess” Salem who comes to Ansel to forcibly recruit young women “chosen” to be Huntresses; despite being cold and clearly vicious, when Jaune appears to pass her test (by slicing his cheek open to see if it heals, to determine if he’s Ozma’s reincarnation), she shuts down the superstitious villager and still pays Jaune the same as she would any of the girls conscripted to serve as huntresses.
• Plagued by Nightmares: Jaune, apparently since he was born, has suffered horrible night terrors, always with the same subject matter: a man being tortured by a monstrous woman. This persistent issue has always been a source of fear and uncertainty for the folks in his village, with them shunning him as "cursed".
• Plausible Deniability: Cobbin tells Jaune to not tell him where he's going as he's fleeing the village, as it means that when Salem's Chosen inevitably arrive to investigate, he can be honest when he says he doesn't know where Jaune is.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Mayor Cobbin ultimately proves a surprisingly calm head in the face of an angry mob trying to kill Jaune, managing to talk them down by pointing out that by declaring Jaune the Dark Lord when even Salem's own Huntresses didn't, then they're trying to claim they're smarter than her - and even if they're right and Jaune is the Dark Lord, then they're still being stupid if they think they could stop him with pitchforks and torches. He later reveals that he knows Jaune is possessed, giving him time to run away while framing the narrative to keep his family clear from the village.
• Refuge in Audacity: The main reason why Ruby is able to escape from the Huntresses so many times is because the very idea that anyone would want to do so to begin with is so foreign to them that they don't even think to have any security measures on her. As a result, the second time she escapes, she not only escapes their custody, but takes a horse and some supplies with her, all without even being seen.
• Refusal of the Call:
  • Ruby has been Chosen by Huntresses, but promised her mother on the latter's deathbed that she would not become a Huntress herself. She fled Patch with her dad rather than let herself be taken away, only to later coincidentally run into another Huntress delegation in a village the party is passing through and have to go through the call and refusal again.
  • Jaune wants no part of Ozma's goals. He's a goddess-fearing adherent of the Eternity Queen's faith, and has no reason to doubt she's a glorious ruler besides the testimony of her evil enemy. Though Ozma urges him to rebel, and the Chosen search for him, the whole issue is a non-starter as far as he's concerned, and all he wants is to live his life without the Dark Lord's feud screwing things up for him. Unfortunately, Ozma exposes him so completely that there's no possible way for him to escape the conflict.
• Retired Badass:
  • Nicholas spent his adolescence and early adulthood as a squire and mercenary, respectively. He even fought a previous vessel of the Dark Lord himself. Ultimately though, he left the life of danger and adventure and settled in Ansel, using his knowledge and experience to help the rest of the village prosper.
  • Taiyang was once part of the same tribe of bandits as Qrow and Raven, founded it with the two of them in fact, and terrorized southern Mistral until he fell in love with Summer Rose and left them to be with her.
• Revenge Before Reason: Reckless actions done for this reason tend to go badly and make things worse for whoever tries it.
  • When face-to-face with Salem, Ozma is unable to resist attacking her. This leaves Jaune a fugitive and ruins the trust between them.
  • Ren's attempt to kill Weiss fails catastrophically; he is blinded easily and would have been killed if not for Jaune/Ozma's intervention.
• Sanity Slippage: Thanks to the trauma Salem forced on Ozma long ago, all of his hosts eventually fall into insanity as their personalities are consumed.
• Sanity Strengthening: As unreliable and flighty as he is, Ozma seems more lucid than the stories make him out to be. Indeed, according to Salem it's been a long time since he's been lucid enough to do much of anything substantial, fifty incarnations at least. For all that time it's been ineffectual flailing rebellion at best, and not even being a functional person at worst. Being able to get close enough to steal the Relic of Knowledge and trick Salem is apparently the most focused he's been in thousands of years, and taken as evidence that his sanity is healing somehow.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: For a given value of "evil", this is Ozma's fate. Huntresses scour the land to find his latest host, capture him, then imprison him in the heart of Salem's stronghold, keeping him alive as long as possible so that he cannot meddle even if he has the presence of mind to. The can broke with his latest death seventeen years ago, and parties like Cinder and Pyrrha have been trying to recover him ever since.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: At Ozma's request, Jaune stays in Mistral to help the rebellion and go some lengths to making up for Ozma's failure there years ago. After weeks of travel, battle, and loss, witnessing some of the worst of what humanity can become, Jaune succeeds. He joins the united armies of the rebellion, breaches Mistral's capital, and slays the tyrant Willow. Ozma can't help but feel things were too easy... and sure enough, within hours the capital is swarmed with thousands of Grimm from all sides. Jaune and his party escape, but are utterly demoralized that after all their work to fight for Mistral's freedom, the end result is the rebellion and most of the civilian population being slaughtered.
• Shaming the Mob: After witnessing Jaune use aura to fight off some Grimm, within hours most of Ansel is gathered outside the Arc home, demanding the Dark Lord's head. Mayor Cobbin disperses it by asking the mob whether they think they know better than the Goddess's chosen who'd already found him clean, whether they should be calling for blood just because someone did something heroic despite the odds, and whether they'd let themselves be whipped up into a frenzy at the word of someone with an axe to grind. Cobbin knows that his logic is suspect and won't work for long after the shame wears off, so he has Jaune sent away before the townsfolk see through it and come back.
• Sole Survivor: Nicholas was the only one of the Golden Griffons to walk away alive from their last job: hunt down and kill a band of rebels led by the Dark Lord himself. That was when Nicholas decided he'd had enough of the mercenary life, ultimately made his way to Ansel, and settled down to start a family.
• Spared by the Adaptation: Lie Ren's mother An, rather than having died when he was a child, survived the destruction of his village and now leads one faction of La Résistance. Then her cell of the rebellion is wiped out while Jaune's party is away.
• Split-Personality Takeover: The Dark Lord's mind is known to drive his hosts to madness, and once it does he is the one in control. Though the timeline lines up suspiciously, Cinder and Pyrrha were not confident in the first place that Jaune could be the Dark Lord's vessel because he should have lost himself by now (and their test seemingly confirms this).
• Super Breeding Program: Huntresses are encouraged to settle down with strong men and have children. And it is encouragement, subsidized when it happens but not forced — though Pyrrha mentions the Church is encouraging especially hard lately. Wisdom holds that this kind of union has a better chance of producing daughters that are candidates to become Huntresses themselves. One such daughter is Ruby, and apparently her super lineage was very successful.
• Sweet Polly Oliver: One of Jaune's opponents in the Spring Tournament melee is a knight clad fully in obscuring armor. Ozma senses something about him is amiss, and sure enough, the fight ends up revealing it: the knight isn't a him, but a her, an Aura-using woman who was swapped in place of a male competitor to gain an unfair advantage over the unpowered men's bracket. The authorities award Jaune victory by disqualification and give him better medical attention to compensate for their failing to vet the entrants properly.
• Teleportation: This is one magical ability possessed by Ozma. After exposing Jaune in public, he escapes the authorities by warping into the wilderness outside the city, not quite a mile away.
• Tournament Arc: The Branwen bandits plan to participate in Vale's annual Spring Tournaments. There's events like jousting and archery, but the main draw for the bandits and spectators is the grand melee, where a hundred people are thrown into an arena, do what they can, and one walks out with a pile of gold. This year, and every twenty, there's also another prize: a use of one of the four Relics, this time the questions from Knowledge. For lack of any idea what to do with his life now that he's on the run, Jaune agrees to fight with them to try and learn where he can go to be safe from discovery.
• Trauma Button: Ozma says he's been saner recently than he has been in a long time, but when Salem is directly involved he can't keep a grip on his thoughts and decisions. According to him, that's why he attacked Salem in Jaune's body.
• Unskilled, but Strong: Salem may be the single most powerful being on the planet, with only Ozma to rival her, but thousands of years of resting on her laurels and using her immortality as a crutch means that she kind of sucks as a fighter and even as a mage. In the final battle she throws around massive displays of magic which are more than enough to overpower normal human opponents, but when faced with newly-lucid Ozma, who's almost as powerful but also the World's Best Warrior and The Archmage, he can easily defeat her (just not kill her).
• Victory Is Boring: Salem, overseeing the Spring Tournaments in Vale, seems detached and uninterested in the event, and only musters a hint of real interest when Ozma reveals himself in Jaune's body. It's later revealed that once she'd broken him, she went the next few thousand years without any significant threat to her rule and is profoundly bored for it. Now that there's the possibility his mind is healing, she's looking forward to having genuine conflict in her life again. She soon finds herself regretting this as she begins to lose control of the situation, undergoing a Villainous Breakdown that is costing her the support of her people as she loses her mind and begins to become more of a tyrant in an effort to stay in control.
• Villainous Breakdown:
  • As the situation in Mistral reaches its boiling point, Willow Schnee loses grip on whatever sanity she had left. She declares that she alone is worthy to represent the Goddess's will, executing the assigned Huntresses from Vale that had thus far failed to capture the Dark Lord, and that all of Mistral is irredeemable and must be wiped clean, initiating a Final Solution on the entire country outside of the largest and most loyal cities.
  • Once Jaune and Ozma begin to turn the tides, Salem is shown to be slowly reaching one herself as it slowly becomes more and more apparent that she has the possibility to lose. Rather than allow Ozma to regain the world she has worked so hard to rule over, she decides to enact a scorched earth response, sending her Grimm to destroy the world and wipe out every civilization on the continents, leaving only the main city of Vale untouched. And as the situation grows worse, the people of the city are starting to doubt her, with many of those loyal to her trembling in fear as she becomes more dictatorial and orders a purge of the faunus civilians for the crime of being of the same people who swore allegiance to the Dark Lord.
• Villain with Good Publicity: Salem is now beloved the world over and credited with all prosperity the people enjoy, the truth of her monstrous acts and connection to the Grimm long forgotten. There have been periods of discontent where anger from her subjects begins to boil over into rebellion, but that isn't something that's brought up in polite company.
• Wham Episode:
  • Chapter 25: Before Jaune can get what he's been fighting for, Ozma forces his secret out in the open and makes him public enemy number one. Jaune asks the Relic of Knowledge his intended question, where he can hide from Salem, and is sadly told that now there is nowhere he can hide that she won't follow. He's stuck in this conflict for good, whether he likes it or not.
  • Chapter 55: The true nature of the setting is finally described. The story doesn't take place concurrently in the timeline with canon, it's thousands of years in the future, and in continuity with canon (or a setting close enough to it). Remnant had its four (plus one) kingdoms, its Huntsmen, and its advanced technology, but the Dust that made that all possible ran dry, causing Ozma's work to collapse and Salem to turn the tables. Just about every character with a canon counterpart is the second iteration of a character who lived and died millennia ago in a context similar to canon, and not even Ozma knows why.

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