is it ok if i ask you what your opinion is on the symbolism of red in the schnee family (each member having one article of clothing that is red- breaking away from the white- dark blue-grey aesthetic)? I personally have the theory that it is meant to be an allusion to the poisoned red apple in the Snow White fairy tale, but i would like to get your input if that's ok. Btw, i love this blog and your theories- theyre great!!!!

Of course it is okay!!!! The ask button is there for asking things so if you are asking something you are using it correctly and should feel a wave of positive feelings about yourself because you are a wonderful person who is using a thing for the purpose for which it was intended! No guarantees you are going to get a satisfactory answer, though, and also I’ve been under the weather a lot lately so I am sorry about slow replies.

Also, some people use the ask option to send me messages telling me I don’t know things and that is confusing because there is no question mark and I am not sure what sort of response those people are hoping to get. They don’t tend to get it, I don’t think, because I don’t tend to reply to those.

But anyway your question! I actually read your post about that earlier when I saw you liking my stuff and checked out your blog, and it was very interesting! I do not myself actually have any opinion on the significance of the usage of red in the Schnee family wardrobe generally. While costumes in RWBY tend to be filled with meaningful details that can be very subtle, my own style of investigation into the show rarely uses trying to guess at the meaning of such symbolism as its starting point. Instead I look to costume details as a way to further support connections and parallels already suggested by allusions, or less often I look at the themes of the entire ensemble of a character to try and generate ideas for where I should be looking outside of RWBY for allusions the creators have never declared. (For example, why does Yang dress in stylized western wear?) I haven’t yet seen anything in the allusions that the Schnee family makes which suggested to me that kind of coordinated use of red across multiple characters, so I haven’t looked at their collective usage of red as potentially representing something.



As for the inner red lining used in Weiss’s original combat outfit, I personally always took that as symbolism of how Weiss is cold on the outside but warm on the inside. I never saw it as anything deeper than that, and I don’t know why the red was removed from her outfit after the Fall of Beacon. This doesn’t mean that the red in her outfit doesn’t have other, deeper significance though! Just that I haven’t identified any myself.

As for Whitley’s lack of red- the one allusion I could point to that might have something to do with this is the character of Kai from Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, who I am certain Whitley is heavily based upon. Kai is a cursed boy who has a tiny splinter of a shattered, evil magic mirror stuck in his eye, which makes it so he can only see ugliness and never beauty, and whose heart has been frozen by the kiss of the Snow Queen. Kai was once friendly and kind, but after being cursed he became cruel, and he was eventually kidnapped by the Snow Queen and taken away to be kept prisoner in her palace. But even though Kai is a cursed prisoner, because his heart is frozen he doesn’t feel anything, so he does not even want to be freed, and is content to remain with the Snow Queen as her pet, appreciating the pure mathematical geometry of the ice crystals in her palace, as math is the only thing he can still see beauty in. So, I think that Whitley’s lack of any red in his outfit may be in part an allusion to the frozen heart of Kai from The Snow Queen.

As for Winter and Willow- I don’t have a specific opinion on the color of the brooch they both wear on their collar, however, I think it is super significant that it appears to be the exact same brooch. In fact, if you compare adult Winter with the depiction of Willow in the family portrait, adult Winter seems to be wearing an identical shirt to the one her mother is wearing under her vest in that portrait. Furthermore, portrait Winter has very similar color layout to her mother in general, with similarly shaped vests with identical buttons arranged in a double breast. Adult Winter’s vest is a different color than her mother’s, but the cut is even more similar. I think the biggest tell though, is that Winter’s hairstyle is just a slight variation on her mother’s: her side bangs hang to the right instead of the left, she wears her bun high instead of low, and she only has a curly sidelock on one side instead of both. But that’s it; otherwise their hairstyles are identical. What do I think all this means? I think it’s symbolic foreshadowing that Winter, just like Ruby, is in many ways a carbon copy of her mother, and an inheritor of a heavy legacy. Weiss may be doing a great job of breaking free of her family’s negative influences right now, but I think we’re going to see as the story progresses that Winter is still set up to follow exactly in her mother’s fated footsteps- and that just as has been heavily foreshadowed for Ruby, Winter must also face a trial of not succumbing to the same fate as her mother did.