Beep Boop Bop

“And to make matters worse, some…vagabond has seized one of my ships.”



What an odd thing to call Roman, who is usually so sharply dressed. I wonder if perhaps Ironwood knows something we don’t about Roman that would prompt him to say that.

But perhaps Ironwood knew Roman when he looked a bit more vagabond-y:

I wonder if whatever Ironwood knows about Roman is why he just stuck Roman in a small metal box for a couple of weeks in lieu of taking him to an actual prison, as if he wasn’t sure what to do with him. But at the same time, the cell was seriously lacking in being anything other than a box–did Ironwood know Roman wouldn’t need much to keep going? Indeed, the cell doesn’t seem to have been a concern: the cell barely had sitting room, no bed, no toilet, no shower…yet not a hair on Roman’s head was out of place. He wasn’t even stiff.



Another odd thing about Roman is the way he fights. We’ve seen Roman fight several times–we’ve seen him lose several times too–and he’s shown incredible reflexes, strategizing, affinity with piloting mechs…but not once have we seen him use his Semblance. I wonder if it’s because he doesn’t really have one. If so, he’d share that distinction with Penny.

Interestingly, that’d be at least the second thing he shares with Penny, because his character basis and hers are already from the same story: Pinnochio. All of the other characters who share a story that we’ve seen thus far (e.g., the Inner Circle and the Wizard of Oz) are closely connected…but Roman and Penny don’t seem to be connected at all.



Unless…our successful, sweet Penny Polendina wasn’t the first curly-ginger-haired experiment conducted by Atlas.

Perhaps Roman is also a robot: an escaped prototype (pre-sword-backpack, hence the handheld weapon), and one who has given up on being a good “real boy” and has put his talents to use in crime. And perhaps as he grew in notoriety, he went from looking like Penny’s big brother to the Clockwork Orange character we know today.



Interestingly, Roman’s final outfit and weapon aren’t featured on his concept art page in the end credits, which is a departure from most such end-credit plates. I wonder if perhaps that’s a hint that there’s more to Roman’s final design yet to be revealed in the show…maybe some mechanical bits?

Roman being an escaped Atlesian android would also provide some motivation for what Roman told Ruby in Episode 11: “It’s not what I have to gain, it’s that I can’t afford to lose.” Now, there’s no disputing that Roman is a terrible person–he certainly delights in destruction–but at the same time, it seems like his story might be a little more nuanced than it first appears. As if perhaps he’d have been a more chaotic-neutral agent, rather than on the side of evil, except that he knows for certain that losing this war to Ozpin’s side means losing something critically important. Maybe he won’t survive otherwise.

I wonder what would happen to a malfunctioning mechanical man who returned to–or was successfully captured by–the side of good, and was put back into the hands and lab of someone who likes to experiment with stuffing Aura into robots. Do you think he’d ever be the same again?



There are some bets you just don’t take.

Imagined doom and gloom aside though, this reveal would bode well for Roman: a robot body probably has a better chance of surviving a Grimm nom (particularly because, as Cinder said, they probably can’t tell the difference between an Aura-imbued robot and a human, and so wouldn’t have done anything other than swallow him whole), as well as the subsequent explosion. Maybe he would even have gotten out relatively intact.

Whether he would take that opportunity to escape and let both sides think he’s dead (with the exception of Neo, presumably), or whether he would continue on fighting for Cinder…well, that’d be something worth betting on.

