RWBY Analysis – Volume 3 Tone Shift
By DiMono for the Rooster Teeth Community
Some people feel that the shift in tone in the second half of RWBY Volume 3 was too sudden –
too much, too soon. Some have also said that they feel betrayed by Rooster Teeth, because the show
they watched in Volumes 1 and 2 led them to believe that future Volumes would be the same – a slice
of life program at a school of mystical killing-things. Some feel that the writers could have gotten the
same message across without killing off 2 main characters and dismembering a third. And finally, some
feel that everything about Pyrrha's death was bad and didn't serve a purpose, going so far as to say that
her character wouldn't have gone into that fight in the first place. I can't change how anyone feels about
how Volume 3 ended, but I think I can at least explain why they did what they did.
Let's start at the beginning.
Why are Volumes 1 and 2 so Cheerful?
There are two things to address within Volumes 1 and 2. First, just how cheerful are they?
Volume 1 actually contains a Chibi Ruby, and Volume 2 contains ...Zwei. Zwei is a happy cheerful
corgi who can turn into a happy cheerful fireball, and loves to do it. Zwei is amazing, and adorable. The
colours are bright, the voices are energetic, and Volume 2 begins with a giant food fight (how “It will
be delicious!” never made it onto a shirt is beyond me).
But that's only what's going on in the foreground. What about the world that's going on behind
the scenes? Well, to put it simply, the world of Remnant is terrifying.
First of all, we have the Grimm, which are basically presented to us as evil incarnate. They're
attracted to fear, and enjoy destroying things. The only reason that schools like Signal and Beacon even
exist is that the Grimm are such a huge problem in the world that those schools are necessary. It's not
like Harry Potter, where Hogwarts is basically only a thing because it may as well be one – if Hunters
and Huntresses didn't exist, the Grimm would overrun Remnant and destroy humanity. There are in fact
dozens of ghost towns in Remnant, where everyone was killed or driven out by the Grimm.
More subtly, there's the blatant racism. The Faunus have been oppressed in one way or another
for centuries. The White Fang is a terrorist organization that only exists because some Faunus have
grown tired of waiting for peaceful solutions, and want to do something more direct – if they won't be
granted equality, they'll take it by force. The Human/Faunus racism is so strong that Blake hid her
identity for most of the first Volume, because she was afraid of what would happen if people knew she
was Faunus.
Then there's the Dust. We're told at the beginning of Volume 1 that there isn't magic on
Remnant, but there's a chemical called Dust that enables people to do things that would be considered
magic elsewhere. And it turns out that Dust is something that's been commercialized, and the Schnee
family has what may as well be a monopoly on the stuff.
When something is that valuable, it becomes a target for crime and corruption. Black market
Dust is a fairly big deal in Remnant. There are gangs that are centred around the stuff, the same way
that some gangs in our world are centred around cocaine. The first scene of Volume 1 actually begins as
a Dust robbery, and the acquisition of Dust remains a central theme of the first Volume.
So how cheerful are Volumes 1 and 2 actually? It depends where you look. As the audience,
we've been directed to look within the walls of Beacon Academy, wherein the students have food fights
and build makeshift bunk beds for which the physics just don't make any sense. Which brings us to the
second question about the tone of Volumes 1 and 2: why? Why are we being directed to look in on the
happy-go-lucky school, rather than the rest of the world?
It has to do with two things: point of view, and dramatic contrast. For the most part, our POV
character for the show is Ruby. That means everything we see is being shown to us how Ruby sees it.
And Ruby, not to put too fine a point on it, sees Beacon through rose-coloured glasses.
For Ruby, being at Beacon is literally a dream come true. She is so enamoured with the very
concept of Hunters that when she meets Glynda for the first time, she asks for an autograph. Her life's
ambition is to train at Beacon, so when she gets accepted, she's bouncing off the walls with joy.
Everything that happens at Beacon is shown to us as being awesome, because to Ruby, it is awesome.
Being a teenager and getting exactly what you want is the best.
In a world where everything is awesome, consequences and negative effects are overlooked.
Sometimes they're forgotten entirely after the fact, because the only thing you want to focus on is how
great everything else was. This has to be the reason that the Grimm fight at the end of Volume 2 is
shown to us how it is shown: with all the students kicking ass and never being in danger. Because when
something like that happens, when you tell the story after the fact, you skip over the parts where
anyone was in danger, and just talk about how a group of plucky students pulled together to save the
town from an army of Grimm. (It's possible that Volumes 1, 2, and most of 3 are being shared with us
by an Unreliable Narrator, but that discussion is beyond the scope of this one.)
More to the point, it's important to consider that Ruby's POV is inside Beacon. Beacon is
shielded from the outside world – those things I mentioned as being in the background are kept in the
background because the environment of Beacon Academy is heavily insulated from them. It has to be –
otherwise the students would most likely be killed before they knew enough to defend themselves
properly.
The environment of Beacon is essentially a bubble. Good things are inside the bubble, and bad
things are outside the bubble (in fact there's a literal bubble surrounding the stadium for the Vytal
tournament, which the Grimm eventually burst through – symbolism at its finest). Volumes 1 and 2
take place at a time when the bubble is fully intact, and the students are effectively protected from the
horrors of the outside world. They're able to be happy and bouncy there because the things that would
stop them from being that way are being actively kept away from them. As long as the bubble remains
strong, things that happen at Beacon remain happy and bouncy.
It is vitally important that we see the students of Beacon in this happy and bouncy environment,
because it directly sets up the dramatic contrast for how Volume 3 ended. Dramatic contrast is basically
the difference between the tones of two scenes, and the effect the first has on the second.
The simplest version of this is to follow a sad scene with a happy scene; the happy scene seems
even happier when compared to the sad scene that came before it. If every scene was happy, the happy
scene would be just another scene, but since the sad scene is there to stand in contrast, the happy scene
becomes actually happy. Or, to borrow a line from Vampire in Brooklyn: if every day is a sunny day,
then what's a sunny day?
What the first two Volumes of RWBY being so upbeat serves to accomplish thematically is to
give us something to compare against what comes next. More specifically, it shows us the world as it's
supposed to be, according to the teenage mind, before replacing it with how it is. It shows us what's
been lost when the dramatic shift happens.
This is a standard device for adventure stories. It's even covered in Miles' ASMR video where
he reads about the Hero's Journey – it's the very first part. At the beginning of the story, we are shown
our future hero in their standard, dull existence, specifically so that we can compare the adventures they
go on and where those adventures take them vs. where they came from.
Think about some movies you've seen. If The Lord of the Rings started off with the Hobbits
leaving the Shire, would you have actually cared about whether they made it back home? Towards the
end of Return of the King, when Frodo and Sam are on the rock surrounded by lava, reminiscing about
home, if you hadn't seen the Shire, you wouldn't have any emotional attachment to what they're talking
about. Instead, because you've seen it for yourself, it's heartbreaking.
Jupiter Ascending starts off with Mila Kunis literally scrubbing toilets for a living. Then she
becomes Queen of the Galaxy. If you hadn't seen her at her lowest at the start of the movie, and she
could have just been anyone, then that rise would be completely unremarkable. But since you know
how low she is when she starts, you can compare that to her eventual role, and it makes it more
impressive.
Most movies you've seen do this in one way or another. The first 15-30 minutes are there to
establish who the characters are now, so that you can later compare that to who they become. It's not
always 15-30 minutes though; at the start of Die Hard 3, the opening credits are bright happy scenes of
the streets of New York set to the song Summer in the City, and suddenly a building explodes and the
plot begins.
A more dramatic example is Pearl Harbor. Imagine you don't know about World War 2, and
you're watching the movie randomly. For the first hour and a half, you have a fairly standard romantic
movie, with character building and conflict, and then all of a sudden Japanese bombers attack. Ships
are sunk, hundreds die, and the next hour and a half are a war movie. That shift in tone and plot came
suddenly, but if the movie had started with the attack, you wouldn't care about any of the characters;
you wouldn't know that they were thrust from a peaceful assignment suddenly into chaos.
That is what the first two volumes of RWBY were about. We got 6 hours of character
development, so that we would learn about them and care about them. So that we'd learn what Beacon
Academy was like before it was taken. So that we'd know the dynamics between the characters then, in
order to compare them to the dynamics that develop later. So that we'd know what was lost. In 7 or 8
years, when Weiss says to Ruby in the middle of a burnt-out wasteland “Remember when Taiyang sent
Zwei to you?” you will remember back to Volume 2, and how happy it was, and you will compare that
to what's on the screen, and the scene will become even more tragic. Without the happy bubbliness of
Volumes 1 and 2, there would not be anything for the characters to refer back to, because as far as the
viewer is concerned, it never happened. That is why Volumes 1 and 2 must be how they were – so that
we can remember them, and remember Beacon, and teams RWBY and JNPR and the others, and look
back on them as the plot continues forward.
Why was the Change so Sudden?
In order to evaluate how sudden the change was, we need to look at some of the things that
happened within the first 2 Volumes of RWBY.
The first scene of the show is a group of gangsters trying to kill a teenage girl. They go so far as
to fire rockets at her, and she's only saved by Glynda ex Machina. That is how we are introduced to the
plot.
Later, when it's time to pick teams, the students are launched into a Grimm-filled forest, with no
way to break their fall, and the teachers just hope they all survive. And they almost don't all survive.
At the end of Volume 1, team RWBY are trying to take down a warehouse run by Torchwick.
They're outnumbered, and in trouble, until Penny ex Machina happens.
Throughout Volume 2, Cinder and her lackeys are doing things that are more and more devious.
It's clear at this point that something big is brewing, especially when they plant the Red Queen in the
Beacon computers.
Volume 2 introduces us to an army of automatons, which only exists because the military thinks
it has to. These are later stolen by Torchwick.
Towards the end of Volume 2, team RWBY and Oobleck end up in life-or-death struggles on a
train that's rocketing towards Vale and blowing holes in the track along the way, to lead Grimm into the
city.
The last episode of Volume 2 is mostly a giant fight between Beacon students and an army of
Grimm, and much of the town gets destroyed. Lots of people get hurt (off-screen), but Beacon is
victorious.
Now, let's look at Volume 3. Cinder's plans are continuing to move, and there is a clear divide
within Remnant's leadership about how militarized places like Beacon should be (i.e. the world outside
the bubble is getting more scary).
Pyrrha is shown Amber, the Fall Maiden (and we are shown how Cinder and her group tried to
kill Amber once already), and is told that she must accept Amber's powers, effectively in order to save
the world.
Halfway through the Volume, Yang is tricked into shooting Mercury in the leg, apparently for
no reason as far as anyone else is concerned.
Pyrrha's stoic veneer starts to crack, and she begins revealing her semblance more overtly.
When Pyrrha, fighting already under mental stress, is made to believe that Penny has orders of
magnitude more blades than she really has, she unleashes her full semblance, and kills(?) Penny.
Cinder and the White Fang bring Grimm to Beacon, and free Torchwick. In the ensuing battles,
Amber is killed, Blake is stabbed, Yang loses an arm, Pyrrha is killed, Beacon is lost, and Ruby learns
she's much more powerful than she thought.
There has actually been a steady increase in dark themes in the show for the last 3 years. The
difference is that before, the dark scenes were offset by light-hearted scenes. Since we all wanted
RWBY to be a light-hearted show, those are the scenes we focused on – but the dark scenes were still
there. For the last few episodes of Volume 3, there were no light-hearted scenes to break up the dark
scenes. Rather than being spread out over 7 or 8 episodes, they happened all at once. That is why it
seemed so sudden: not because there wasn't adequate build-up, but because suddenly all the fun stuff
wasn't there to break things up. Even the train fight had fireball Zwei.
There is a rapid increase in danger in each Volume. At the end of Volume 1, there's a big fight in
a warehouse, and the good guys don't feel any lasting consequences. At the end of Volume 2, there's a
big fight against dozens of Grimm right in the middle of Vale, and it takes everyone who's available to
defend the city, which still takes heavy damage. At the end of Volume 3, there's a huge fight in Beacon
itself, and the good guys finally lose. If the end of Volume 2 had been shot differently, so that we
thought while watching it that the good guys might actually lose, then I seriously doubt the fans would
be having this conversation about whether the shift to darker material was too sudden. As it stands, the
shift was more gradual than some thought, but it was easy not to notice it. And I'm completely skipping
all the implied stuff, like parental deaths and abandoned towns.
Could it Have Been Done Without The Deaths?
This is an important question. If the point of the end of Volume 3 was to establish in our minds
that the rest of the show is not going to be as happy as it had been up until now, did they really need to
kill two fan favourites to get that point across? Wouldn't losing Beacon have been enough? I don't think
it would have been. I think the deaths are necessary.
This goes back to Ruby being our POV character. Remember, Ruby sees everything to do with
Beacon as being amazing, to the point of thinking that everything is awesome, all the time. One effect
of the end of Volume 3 is that Ruby's rose-coloured glasses are lifted, and she's forced to see the world
how it really is. In the real world, actions have consequences. In the real world, fighting has risks. In
the real world, people die.
Up until now, Ruby has been viewing her time at Beacon as fun. Watching Pyrrha kill Penny,
and later watching Cinder kill Pyrrha, finally cements in Ruby's head that being a Huntress isn't about
having fun. Being a student who's learning about being a Huntress may be fun, but once you actually
get out there in the real world, where there aren't any professors or other people around to protect you
and you need to fight on your own, your life is legitimately at risk.
The attack at the end of Volume 3 doesn't just burst the bubble that Beacon exists within to keep
it safe; it also bursts the bubble that Ruby has been living in since she got accepted to Beacon. The
romance and glamour of the life of a Huntress has finally fallen away, and she sees that it's really all
about death. Ruby has been forced to become an adult.
Now, let us suppose that neither Penny nor Pyrrha had to die. Since Penny's death was the
catalyst for Cinder's speech, let us further suppose that Penny was injured, but still able to talk,
indicating continued life. How would these changes affect Ruby, our POV character?
If Pyrrha never dies, then Ruby never experiences loss in the context of being a Huntress. With
Pyrrha still alive, Ruby is able to tell herself things are still okay, because her friends are all still
together. They escape Beacon safely, and they can all work together to put things right. Ruby is able to
remain optimistic.
That would not allow for Ruby to grow as a person. Thus far in the series, she has been
characterized by boundless optimism and the power of friendship. It is only through watching two of
her friends die that she realizes optimism isn't going to get her through life.
In Volume 2, she is so sure of her teenage invincibility that she wants to try to kill three giant
Grimm, just because they're there – it's only Oobleck telling her that they're no threat to each other that
calms her down. After Penny's and Pyrrha's deaths, she's shaken. Her belief that everything will turn
out well because it always has before is gone, because after Pyrrha dies, it hasn't always turned out well
any more. Pyrrha being hurt but surviving is a setback; a bump in the road, like everything else has
been. Pyrrha being killed is actual defeat. For the first time.
They could have had the Grimm kick everyone out of Beacon without anyone having to die,
certainly. But from a character standpoint, just clearing out Beacon wouldn't be enough to force the
personal growth in Ruby that she needs to undertake in order to survive the rest of the series. And that's
the important part of Volume 3.
Was Pyrrha's Death Random and Meaningless
This is another big one. The argument is roughly as follows: Pyrrha knew she was outmatched.
She knew she wouldn't survive that fight, so she had no reason to enter it. Further, once the tower had
fallen, she had no reason to stay. Her death didn't serve the plot, and only served to trigger Ruby ex
Machina.
In order to evaluate Pyrrha's death, we need to track her through all of Volume 3. The first thing
that happens with her that's relevant is that she's shown the Fall Maiden, and told that she's the best
match for what remains of the Maiden's powers. This is a heavy weight to bear, and she's not ready for
it.
When she returns to the normal world, she understandably has a lot on her mind. She even
manhandles Jaune using her semblance, which we haven't seen her use overtly before then. She knows
what's wanted of her, and how important it is, but she's unprepared, and that is affecting her ability to
handle herself.
When she finally enters the arena to fight Penny, Emerald makes her hallucinate that Penny has
many more blades than she actually has. Between the hallucination and the stress she's under, she uses
her semblance at apparently full power, and cuts Penny in half. Then, that incident is used by Cinder as
the final example of how unsafe Beacon is, and the attack begins.
As the attack continues, Pyrrha decides that she is ready for the burden of the Fall Maiden's
powers, and she returns with Jaune to the chamber where they're keeping Amber. She enters the
chamber to receive the Maiden's powers, and partway through the transfer process, with Jaune's
attention on the chambers because Pyrrha cried out, Cinder kills Amber and takes the Maiden's powers
for herself.
Pyrrha and Jaune escape the chamber, while Ozpin battles Cinder. Cinder ends up on top of the
tower, and Pyrrha kisses Jaune, sends him away to get help, and ascends the tower to confront Cinder.
She controls most of the fight, but ultimately loses when Cinder's arrows pierce her achilles tendon,
and then her heart, and then Cinder melts her away. Ruby witnesses the end of it, and in her anger and
grief she unleashes power she didn't know she had, and later wakes up in a hospital bed.
I believe there are three aspects of Pyrrha's death that we need to look at in order to evaluate
whether it was a good death. 1) Did she experience growth as a character as part of the process, or did
she die just for sake of dying? 2) Do the actions leading up to the death make sense? 3) Does her death
serve to advance the story?
1) Did Pyrrha Experience Character Growth?
When Pyrrha is first shown the Fall Maiden, and is asked to accept her powers, she initially
refuses, because she's not sure that she's ready to accept that much responsibility. As the Volume
continues, she learns that it's okay to let Jaune in emotionally (previously only letting him in
personally), and she accepts that even if she's not ready for the responsibility of the Maiden's powers,
she needs to be. Then, when everything goes badly, she chooses fight Cinder, finally putting others
first. She learns to set aside her own fears, and to do what's necessary for the greater good.
That personal development falls squarely within the bounds of character growth. She hasn't had
much of it in the show, because technically she's been a secondary character (how much growth has
anyone but Jaune actually had from team JNPR?), but over the course of Volume 3 she has grown
emotionally and matured. Pyrrha experienced character growth.
2) Do Pyrrha's Actions Make Sense?
To answer this question, we need to put ourselves in Pyrrha's mindset. The actions at issue are
ascending the tower to fight Cinder, and staying there when it was clear she should have left.
It must be established that before she decided to accept the Maiden's powers, Pyrrha knew that
Jaune cared for her. Pyrrha is smart, and she'd have figured that out. Cinder was able to take the
Maiden's powers because Jaune was distracted by Pyrrha's cry, and was not guarding as he should have
been. If Pyrrha had not allowed Jaune to get close, then he wouldn't have been distracted, and he would
have stayed on guard as he was told to do.
Further, if Pyrrha had been brave enough to accept the powers the first time they were offered to
her, before anything bad had happened, then Cinder would not have been able to take the powers
anyway, because she wouldn't have known where they were keeping Amber. Instead, she waited until
the last possible moment – after she'd killed Penny.
This means Pyrrha has two deaths on her conscience: Penny and Amber. Additionally, she does
not know whether Ozpin will survive his fight against Cinder. Since Cinder has the Maiden's powers,
Pyrrha has to assume that Ozpin is about to die, which makes three deaths that she is directly or
indirectly responsible for, within a very short timespan. That is a very heavy burden to bear.
At this point, Pyrrha feels directly responsible for Cinder. It happens that she shouldn't feel that
way, but she doesn't know that, because she's in the moment. And if she's responsible for Cinder, then
she's responsible for everything that Cinder will do if left unchecked. When it becomes clear that
Cinder has beaten Ozpin, and has ascended the tower, Pyrrha takes further responsibility for her
actions, and follows her – but not before sending Jaune away in a weapons locker to go get help.
Pyrrha engages with Cinder for two reasons. First, as stated, to delay her until someone else can
be brought to help fight her. As long as Cinder is occupied with Pyrrha, she's not killing other innocent
people. Second, every moment that Cinder is fighting Pyrrha is a moment that the other people at
Beacon can use to escape. She knows that she will probably die there, but as long as her death allows
others to escape, that is a noble sacrifice that she is willing to make – death for the greater good.
So how outmatched is she? In point of fact, she manages to control the flow of battle more than
Cinder does. Not only does she hold her own, at points she has the upper hand. It is possible (but
cannot be confirmed) that she kept some of the Maiden's powers that had been transferred to her before
Cinder killed the Maiden, in which case she was carrying more power into that fight than anyone may
have thought – including herself. It is only through Cinder using an ability we have not seen before that
she is able to pierce Pyrrha's ankle, and ultimately win the fight.
In the end, Pyrrha delays Cinder for a very long time (she never does get back to hurting
people), and she keeps the fight going long enough for Ruby to arrive and ultimately help. Which
means not only was she justified in engaging with Cinder, but she accomplished both of her goals with
that fight. So yes, her actions made sense and were ultimately justified.
The last question about the fight itself is why did she just sit there and take the arrow, rather
than trying to continue fighting? The simple answer is fatigue, both physical and mental. It doesn't
matter how well trained you are, there comes a time when you know you're beaten, and you just don't
have it in you to keep fighting any more. That is the point that Pyrrha was at. She took the arrow
because she wasn't able not to.
3) Does Pyrrha's Death Advance the Story?
Pyrrha's death actually accomplishes quite a lot, in a very short amount of time. First, it serves
to establish beyond a shadow of a doubt just how much power Cinder actually has. Pyrrha was
established fairly early on as being the best fighter at Beacon, and not only does Cinder defeat her,
Cinder evaporates her body into powder. There is now no possible doubt in the viewers' minds that
Cinder is going to continue being the Big Bad going forward.
Not only do we as the audience know that Cinder is the Big Bad, but Ruby knows it now too.
Pyrrha's death is the first time Ruby has seen Cinder be the lead antagonist. In the first episode, Cinder
appeared to be Torchwick's lackey. In Volume 2 Episode 2, it's clear that Ruby doesn't recognize her
when she pretends to be a transfer student. In the Volume 2 episode where they fight in the tower, Ruby
doesn't know that it's Cinder she's fighting. It is only by watching Cinder kill Pyrrha that Ruby learns
how bad Cinder actually is.
As a result of seeing Pyrrha die, Ruby is able to unleash a power she didn't know she had. That
power ostensibly defeats Cinder, and it freezes the dragon Grimm in place, effectively halting the
attack. Thus Pyrrha's death is indirectly responsible for ending the battle.
As well, Pyrrha's death serves as the final wake-up call to Ruby that the bubble is gone. She and
her friends are no longer protected – anyone can die, at any moment. Pyrrha's death is the final catalyst
for Ruby accepting that things have changed all around her, and she needs to grow up out of her
childish fantasies about what it means to be a Huntress, and actually become one instead. Watching
Pyrrha die is what finally forces Ruby into adulthood.
Yes, it Was a Good Death
By every available metric, Pyrrha's death was a good one. Her actions made sense within the
context of her mindset; she chose to enter the battle as a result of personal growth; the story was
advanced as a result of the death. There is just one more aspect of it that remains to be covered: what
does it mean that she was always meant to die so early?
It has been revealed by Jen Brown, the voice actor for Pyrrha, that one of the first things Monty
told her about Pyrrha was that she was going to die at the end of Volume 3. Does that mean that
everything Pyrrha did was ultimately meaningless? Does it mean she was written as a throwaway
character? Does it mean the audience should fear for the safety of the other characters, lest they
succumb to the same predetermined fate?
First of all, that her death was always planned for Volume 3 is a good thing. It's good because it
demonstrates conclusively that the show is being written with forethought and purpose. The writers
knowing how their characters' stories will end means they've taken the time to plan ahead. They know
far in advance what the beats are going to be in each season, and how those beats will relate to each
character and to the story as a whole.
The alternative would be to have a general idea of what's going to happen, and then wing it. If
that were the case, then Pyrrha's death would have been the result of someone saying “We should
probably kill someone. Why not Pyrrha? She'll do.” That would have been a meaningless death. That
the death was planned means, by definition, that it will serve the rest of the story in some way –
otherwise it wouldn't have been planned out in advance.
Because Pyrrha's death was planned in advance, we can safely assume that the writers of
RWBY know exactly who will live and who will die over the course of the show, and when they will
die, and how. It doesn't make any characters throwaways, because if they were, their deaths wouldn't be
worth planning for. The fact that Pyrrha's death was planned means she was a vital part of the story, and
her death will almost certainly influence things in the years to come.
Now, should you fear for your other favourite characters? Absolutely. You should fear for every
single one of them. Because the other thing that Pyrrha's death does is it establishes for the viewers that
RWBY's is a world where anyone can die at any time. The more you fear for a character's death, the
more you'll fear for their life, and the more meaningful every fight they are in becomes. Now that you
know there are actual risks, you know that the characters' lives really are at stake. The more you care
about the characters, the more you'll celebrate when they win a fight. The more a character's death hurts
you, the higher you'll feel when the remaining ones stick it to the bad guys one more time.
And the characters are at risk. Because they're now venturing alone out into the wilderness of
Remnant, without any teachers, and without any protection other than their own wits and weapons. And
what can we surmise about their odds of survival? Well, to put it simply, the world of Remnant is
terrifying.