So a lot of people like to freak out about the all the potential angst that could come out of ‘Eyepatch Ruby’, ie: Ruby loses an eye (likely to Cinder) and it’s all very dramatic/traumatic and is probably the moment where Ruby has her long-brewing mental and emotional breakdown. Basically, lots of that good ‘rip your heart out and show it to you’ emotional angst we’ve come to expect from RT.

But consider this: That’s not (exactly) what happens.

The thing is, we’ve already gotten an arc wherein a Main Character suffers a horrific, debilitating injury that permanently scars her both physically and mentally, leaving her an emotionally broken wreck. And likewise, followed (and are still following) that character on her long road of recovery. With all the focus RT has put into Yang’s recovery from loosing her arm, I think it’s strange to think that they would simply do the exact same thing again with Ruby.

So, what if that isn’t what happens? What if loosing her eye doesn’t break Ruby?

Now of course I don’t mean something cheap like Ruby just brushes off this horrible injury like nothing happened. Rather, Ruby handles losing her eye in a different way than Yang, and in turn serves as a contrast to what we saw with Yang.

Simply put, what if Ruby just does not break? Sure, she goes through the initial pain and shock, and the lose of her eye is shown to have a clear effect on her. But whereas Yang was completely emotionally and mentally destroyed by what happened to her during the fall of Beacon, which is the reaction we would reasonably expect from any normal person who went through something that horrific, Ruby simply… isn’t. She copes. She recovers. She gets a nifty cybernetic eyepatch from Pietro. And she gets right back into the fight.

I think this would be a perfect way to display just how truly indomitable Ruby’s spirit is. Show her go through the sort of experience that would break just about anyone and leave them permanently scarred and diminished. And show that this is just not enough to break this girl.

Ever since I saw the first fanart depictions of Ruby with an eyepatch back in 2013/2014 (that was back when we were still on Volume 1 BTW. This theory’s been around for a while), I’ve always loved that image. Not just because Ruby had an eyepatch and that looked cool, but because so many of those pieces of fanart also showed a Ruby who still had that bright, friendly, optimistic smile.

You see, a character having an eyepatch is almost always a visual shorthand for ‘this person has seen some serious shit’. People with eyepatches are almost ALWAYS the gruff, dower, edgy and cynical types. And how often have we seen that an eyepatch-wearing gruff badass used to be all bright and optimistic, but then the bad shit happened, they got their eyepatch and now they ‘see the world how it really is’ and ‘aren’t that naïve idiot anymore’?

So think about what it says to have a heroine with an eyepatch, that universal symbol of ‘I’ve been through some bad shit’, who still has a bright, optimistic, friendly, even goofy or adorkable smile. It means she has faced down the kind of horrible events that have broken so many before her.

And it couldn’t break her.