My OC for the Relic of Destruction! Nihil! Who gave me literal arm, leg, and back pain to draw him! So it would seem he’s doing his job haha.
Hope you all enjoy another example of my staples in my art! (hard lighting, dark lighting, big coats, angry/cruel character expressions <3)
Anyways.
Go, be free my chaotic destruction spirit.
One of the things that struck me as weird and anticlimactic about canon RWBY is just how much the introduction of Brother Gods had made the original setting and mystery irrelevant.
Within a single flashback, Ozpin and Salem went from those larger-than-life mysterious figures with unknown goals to just...two characters among many.
In turn, mysteries that drove the show forward, like Raven's beef with Ozpin or what happened with Summer Rose, or why Cinder would follow Salem, just felt pointless, despite the show never having resolved them.
Seriously, why would we care about Raven's conflict with Ozpin or what Summer did at this point in the story? Does it even matter at this point?
It doesn't help that there's no mystery, no "hook" within what the show replaced Ozpin and Salem's mystery with.
Brother Gods (or blacksmith) don't have "depth" nor intrigue. They are the be-all-end-all "explainer" of why things are the way they are, and that's it. The setting doesn't get more complex or intriguing with their existence.
Instead, it actually simplifies more. The story, as it went, didn't necessarily provide you with more puzzle pieces as much as it made the whole puzzle irrelevant, which just feels weird.
They don't properly connect with the rest of the worldbuilding. They sure don't provide any worthwhile additions to it either. The Gods are static, characterless plot devices.
"Why is X the way it is? Because Gods did it!"
So, when one tries to write a rewrite of the story, there are two paths they can take: they either expand and make the cosmology more complex, or they remove the Brother Gods stuff altogether.
For me, personally, as the tangled web of mysteries surrounding Ozpin and why the world is the way it is has always been at the core of RWBY intrigue, the latter option felt like a no-brainer.
An interesting aspect of not doing gods is that scale can vary due to perspective.
This way, there's no "bigger thing" that dwarfs what was important before.
There's a clear-cut beginning of the current Remnant's story with what Ozpin has done. Yet for Ozpin, that point would be actually somewhere in the middle of his own story. And Ozpin's own life would actually be an ending of another story of whatever came before the current Age.
As far as the current story goes, no matter how wide the knowledge of Remnant's history gets, what matters the most is the mystery behind Ozpin and what made Remnant the way it is now.
There's no "going for the bigger fish" that would replace the current focus. There's only expanding and clarifying what the current situation is and why.
It's just so much more fascinating for me to explore Ozpin's motivations and decisions, and how what happened affected the world as a whole, and why.
And, likewise, with Salem, most of those are far more interesting to explore than "Gods Did a Thing and She Is Mad Now".
It just would feel like such a waste to throw away two immortal beings playing a game with "Gods did it".
Why not instead expand upon the rules of the game being played? Why not instead reveal their motivations and goals, and have characters grapple with those revelations, providing character conflict?
How would someone who has lived for centuries change? What would drive someone like that to try over and over again? How would their presence and accumulated knowledge affect the world around them?
There are endless ways to provide context for those two beings and what they are doing without introducing a massive quasi-religious cosmology that just reduces them to "two characters among many".
