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Application for the Box
Player Information
Player name: Taylor
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skycastles or waltztheline @ AIM
Are you over 18: Yes.
Characters in The Box Already: None!
Character Information
Character Name: Weiss Schnee
Canon: RWBY
Canon Point: After the end of volume 2
History: Wiki
Personality: Weiss Schnee, heiress to Schnee Dust Company and huntress-in-training at Beacon Academy. Weiss's lineage plays a large part in who she is. She can be something of a spoiled brat, even reluctantly agreeing that she did tend to get everything that she wanted when she was growing up and had difficulties accepting that she couldn't always get that in the real world at first. This attitude reflected in her actions a lot, including the occasional penchant for arrogance; assuming Ruby was the wrong choice after one day of her being leader, refusing to do anything other than her own way in the very beginning, and a strong pride that is frequently challenged by the other characters-- both about herself and about Schnee Dust Company. Despite this pride and that she does take a bit of nudging to cooperate at times, along with a crabby and negative attitude, she's far from stubborn and has continued to adapt and evolve as she learns more about the world beyond the frame of the Schnee family.
One of the most important things to note about Weiss is that she's adaptable. She's got a strong ability to recognize her weaknesses (usually after a little help noticing them via someone else) and work on it. If there's something wrong with her, whether it be in a fight or in her behavior, she gets on changing it proactively. This is most noticeable after she accepts Ruby as the leader of the team once she's scolded by Professor Port for thinking she should have been the leader, then decides to become the "best teammate" possible and by volume 2, we see that she’s actually made progress on this, even changing her fighting style to support her team beyond just herself. Even in the very beginning of the series, she tells Ruby that she'll try to be less "difficult" and more "nice." It doesn't go as planned at first, but she continues to improve throughout the series, even starting to develop a more playful side that allows her to participate in food fights, board games, and (bad) attempts at punny jokes.
Another important instance of her ability to accept criticism and react appropriately is in regards to the issue of faunus discrimination once she and Blake made up at the end of the first volume. Though she is still unsure what she thinks about Sun, she makes a clear effort at that point to not discriminate against others just because they're a faunus even though she had very clearly made derogatory comments about them only an episode earlier. Her resistance to befriending Sun after that stems largely from his theft and apparent habit of climbing up to look through girls’ windows (he says it’s climbing that he does all the time, Weiss clearly thinks it’s something else). That said, she did have a history of discrimination when it comes to faunus and is actively trying to be better about it. By volume 2, she’s clearly friendly with Team CFVY and Velvet, a rabbit faunus, and is much better friends with Blake. Her racist streak against the Faunus came from her family being at war with the White Fang, a faunus extremist group, and growing up knowing nothing about them besides that the White Fang frequently kidnapped, killed, attacked, and stole from people she knew and cared about. On top of that, she states that her father’s anger about it made for a “very difficult childhood” though doesn’t explain much beyond that she (and likely her sister) suffered indirectly from the White Fang’s actions. Weiss’s discrimination against the White Fang spread to all faunus because of this. Until she met Blake, who she didn't know was a faunus before they became friends, that was her only experience with them. Getting to know Blake before she could discriminate against her likely played a big role in Weiss's ability to adapt her views to make an active decision to improve herself in this case. As with trying to be nicer to Ruby, it's unlikely that it completely disappeared due to deep-seated trust issues, but Weiss has made clear strides to become a better person.
”I'm not perfect!
...Not yet. But I'm still leagues better than you.”
Doing her best is something that Weiss always does. She's well aware that she's not perfect, which is a huge motivation for someone who's a perfectionist like she is. Weiss has the ambition to improve herself no matter what and appears to have a strong desire to achieve absolute perfection. A frequently angry father and being the heiress of a huge company probably meant that Weiss had a lot of pressure put on her and it shows in just how much she focuses on everything from being the first one to raise her hand and answer questions in class to excelling in combat, dust, glyphs, singing, organization, and planning. The last two of which she actually gets fairly excited about. Her excitement about the Vytal Festival and how much planning goes into it shows that she has a real interest in the managerial side of events, probably from growing up surrounded by the family business.
Weiss also happens to have a penchant for doing research before getting into things (shown when she tries to "spy" on Sun since he'll be in the combat tournament with them) and knowing when to back out. It's safe to say she'd rather err on the side of caution, to a point. Weiss was the first to call for retreat from the pack of Ursa and also suggested they avoid fighting the Nevermore and Death Stalker if they could complete their mission without doing so. Avoiding the fights that she can doesn't mean she's a coward though; she simply knew it would be less of a risk to do so. When it came down to the battle or saving Ruby, she fought without hesitation. That isn’t to say she doesn’t enjoy fighting either-- she does. When the girls are trying to decide which mission would get them closest to the White Fang, she immediately suggests they check “Search and Destroy” category missions over all other categories, even though they don’t know which mission would get them in the right area. All of them enjoy fighting and Weiss, despite her understanding of strategic retreat, is one of the team.
Weiss is also a regular girl who loves doing her nails, wearing (combat) skirts, and grew up wanting a bunk bed. This, in addition to her hesitance to speak with both Winter (her sister) and her father, indicates she may not have a great relationship with her sister either. The content of her theme song, Mirror Mirror, alludes to the fact that she was a fairly lonely person before she became a member of Team RWBY. Multiple characters have referred to friends that they had before arriving at Beacon, but Weiss never mentions anyone and even admits to, at least in the case of boys, not being able to take any show of affection seriously due to the fact that most of them want to get close to her because of her family name, rather than because of who she is as a person.
It also explains why she's so bad at getting along with everyone at first. Though Weiss catches on quickly enough, it's clear that getting along with others was never something she had to practice before then. Even after she’s started acting as part of the team, she shows a very distinctive lack of understanding regarding a board game that every other student there already knew how to play. Unfortunately, her newfound relationship with people who aren’t after anything from her yields Weiss’s tendency toward gossip. She’s only shown really telling something she shouldn’t once and at the very least seems to keep it within the team that they’re closest with, but it’s clear that she wasn’t supposed to say anything.
Except for instances like that, once she begins to get along with the other girls better, a playful attitude starts showing. She teases Ruby in a friendly way now, as opposed to her initial behavior of making fun of both her and Jaune. Contrast her original statement of "And we can paint our nails and try on clothes and talk about cute boys, like tall, blonde, and scraggly over there!" to the point near the end of the series when Penny says almost the same thing, quite seriously, to Ruby. Weiss jokes about Penny being "far more coordinated" than Ruby when Ruby asks if that's how she was when they first met. This is in the same scene that she low-fives Ruby over the two of them agreeing on fighting in skirts despite judgment from Blake. She also participates in a food fight, plays games, and even starts to participate and plan things like dances for everyone, rather than just focusing on the very specific self-serving atttitude that she came to Beacon with.
Speaking of dances: boys and dating. While Weiss is incredibly averse to most boys due to her experience with them being after her money rather than herself and can be incredibly crabby, she is not a “tsundere” despite what a surprising amount of fanart tries to claim. When Weiss is attracted to someone, it’s incredibly obvious. She doesn’t tell that person off for calling her cutesy nicknames, she doesn’t get snappy with them, and she doesn’t hide her feelings at all. Weiss is not the type of person to hide her feelings about much of anything, save for very specific and intentional circumstances regarding her behavior around her family and business. Weiss’s face lights up and she does whatever she can, being incredibly forward about her feelings and not hesitating to ask the person of her affections out-- even if it means moping when they say no afterward. On the other side of the coin, Weiss doesn’t have a problem telling boys no when she doesn’t desire their attention, so much so that it earns her the nickname “Ice Queen” amongst so many people that even her enemies start calling her by it. Whether that be normal verbal rejection or literally slamming a door in someone’s face after a serenade. She can definitely handle herself, and she does.
”My father was not the start of our name and I refuse to let him be the end of it.”
Weiss has a strong sense of justice, influenced heavily by war going on between her family and the White Fang. If someone's a thief, they're a thief and it's going to be hard to change that view no matter who or what you are. For a long time after she finds out what Blake had been hiding from them, she still complains about how she's going to be the one to be right to the others because "The innocent never run." Eventually she comes to the conclusion that she doesn't care about Blake's indiscretions because it was in the past, but anyone still acting that way in the future isn’t acceptable to her. That includes her own family’s indiscretions. Her father is not a good person and because of it, her family is accused of the enslavement of faunus and a whole slew of other questionable business practices. Weiss knows that there’s a lot of wrong that he’s done and while she has an intense amount of pride in her family, she knows that he isn’t a part of it. This is why Weiss tasks herself with restoring her family’s honor despite what her father did to it and righting all the wrongs that he inflicted upon the world of Remnant.
This is, in fact, her driving motivation for becoming a huntress instead of taking the easy route of a desk job in her home kingdom of Atlas. She claims that as soon as she learned she was capable of fighting, she knew that it was her responsibility to do what she could to protect people and change the way that things were. Just like Weiss changes as she learns the right way to do things, she wants to fix the damage that her father has done to her family name and change the world along with it. If she has to fight and become a huntress instead of living an easy life, she will, because that’s who she is. A noble, bright young girl with ambition enough to fight and intelligence enough to learn how to do it the right way… while learning what it’s like to understand others along the way.
Items on your character at canon point: Her regular outfit including her skirt, petticoat and other undergarments, shirt, bolero jacket, socks, boots, hands-free belted satchel, necklace, earrings, and a small crown hair accessory. She would also have Myrtenaster (her Multiaction Dust Rapier), extra vials of Dust (especially ice as she uses it most often), and her Scroll (basically their world’s version of a tablet and HP tracker).
Abilities:
Aura: In the world of Remnant, all creatures with a soul have an Aura. Aura is an extension of a person’s soul and when activated and properly honed, it acts as a shield, a weapon, and healing. It protects the user “like a force field" in the brilliant words of Jaune Arc. Realistically, it's an explanation for how characters can take so much damage without being fatally injured and functions like an HP bar. It's visible as an actual HP bar if one of the scrolls provided by Beacon are used. Aura can also heal wounds rapidly, making scars a very unlikely event as it would take wearing down a person’s Aura completely to cause them to be unable to heal from the damage. Aura is also what generates semblances, such as Weiss's glyphs, and can be used with weapons as a conduit for actual attacks. At one point, Weiss projects her aura into a swordfish during a food fight and uses it as an actual sword, showing that actual weapons are not the only things that can be used with Aura-- though they are certainly more effective. Aura can also react with Dust to create a multitude of effects and to control the Dust more effectively than just causing elemental explosions.
Dust: One of Weiss’s primary fighting methods is her use of Dust, far more advanced than most individuals due to her position as the heiress for the primary Dust-producing company in their world. Dust is effectively energy, starting in the four base elements of fire, ice, lightning, and wind. By combining those types of Dust, more types of Dust can be created and can be utilized for everything from an energy source to weaponry. The more mastery a person displays over Dust, the more creative and effective its use, and Weiss does it splendidly. However, since Weiss will not be capable of having a steady source of Dust in the Box, I will not go into detail about the different types of Dust and Weiss’s use of them beyond stating that she excels with the use of the ice element above all others, though she does carry 6 types of Dust in the revolver cartridges of Myrtenaster (her weapon).
Semblance/Glyphs: All of those who have a basic understanding and ability to use Aura exhibit a Semblance, or an ability unique to their soul that no other person has. Weiss’s Semblance is her glyphs. Glyphs are basically magic symbols that allow Weiss to perform various feats to enhance her fighting and defensive capabilities. Glyphs shown in-series include:
Swordplay/Fencing: Weiss’s abilities with a sword are precise, quick, and decisive. She’s incredibly adept with Myrtenaster and uses it mostly as a regular sword in battle, the only exceptions being her use of Dust. Unlike most other weapons in the series, her use of Dust is a largely elemental event rather than simply as ammo for a gun, despite her weapon’s design partially being modeled after a revolver. Her sword style is based on European fencing.
Versatility: Weiss is shown to be incredibly flexible with great reflexes. She performs flips, bends, and a multitude of high jumps that would normally only be capable of a gymnast with superpowers. She can jump off of a highway and land on her feet to perform an attack in the middle of traffic as well as dodge a chainsaw by flipping backward so that it just barely misses her stomach while she moves. And? She does it all in heels and a “combat skirt.”
Organization/Planning: Weiss comments once that Ruby stole her binder in reference to a 5” binder that was previously labeled “Vytal Festival Activities / Property of Weiss Schnee” complete with color-coded post-it tabs. Given that it was all Weiss’s work with Ruby having simply renamed it, it’s very clear that Weiss is incredibly detail-oriented when it comes to planning things out and keeping them organized. Her school work also is likely meticulous in the same way, explaining her exceptional position in the class as self-proclaimed smartest girl in the class.
Singing: In the White Trailer, Weiss is shown singing in a concert to a large audience as a solo singer. It is confirmed that she does in fact have a background in singing and that she is very good at it by Jaune Arc later in volume 2.
Strengths and Weaknesses:
Strengths
Weiss is a very intelligent character and self-proclaimed smartest student in her class. The title itself is unverified but considering how hard she works and her 5” binders, it’s likely to be true. It’s also supported by her forethought, observational, and planning skills, even going so far as to want to track down Sun Wukong upon first meeting him because he was from one of the schools that would be participating in an upcoming tournament. Her forethought is reflected clearly when she presents a special Dust cartridge that plays directly into Blake’s semblance for the train fight against Torchwick (again emphasizing her newfound focus on her team’s success, rather than just her own) within the mission, despite that they did not know that they would run into such a situation beyond what they had hoped. Weiss shows an aptitude for recognizing weakness and accepting constructive criticism after being given some time to process and is shown to be an incredibly adaptive person, developing her skills and focusing on becoming better whenever she recognizes something as wrong. Given that she is a perfectionist and her goal is literally stated at one point to be perfection, it’s easy to see why being able to accept criticism with only minor struggling with it is a strength in her case.
That said, Weiss is an incredibly hard worker. This likely stems from the fact that she is the heiress to Schnee Dust Company and has always had perfection expected of her because of it. She actively criticizes Ruby when Ruby goofs off in class and even makes sure to verbally note when Blake’s grades have been dropping, showing that her ambition for perfection extends beyond just herself. She also recognizes when they are out of their league, including suggesting that they retreat if a specific fight is unnecessary to achieve their goal. Weiss puts an emphasis on strategy more than punchy-smash-smash, which also plays into the fact that her speed, reflexes, flexibility, agility, and versatility are her strengths when it comes to her individual fighting talents.
Despite Weiss’s past Weiss-centric behavior, after making her decision to be the “best teammate ever” she actually developed a fighting style that focused significantly on supporting the other member of her team, as shown in the highway showdown between Team RWBY + Sun and Neptune versus Roman Torchwick in a mecha. During this fight she had been shown to have develop her glyphs to do things such as a speed increase glyph (used on Blake), visual cover when combining her Dust with Yang’s firepower to create a thick mist, using a glyph to pull one of her teammates out of the way of an attack, or even going so far as to sacrifice her footing to cast one on a teammate despite that it lands her face-first on the cement. Weiss is shown to be very creative with her use of her Dust as when she casts it around the group to act as a shield so they don’t all die when a tunnel collapses on them.
One of Weiss’s strengths is also her conviction and her sense of honor. She wants to live up to her family’s name, but she recognizes that her father has done wrong by it and by just about everyone else, particularly the Faunus. Weiss’s quest to regain that honor reflects in her sense of justice, which also is emphasized by her disdain for theft and any criminal activity, particularly that of the White Fang-- which has targeted her family since she can remember due to her father’s actions.
Weaknesses
Pride is probably one of Weiss's main personality flaws. At certain points, she refuses to admit that her family is wrong because of how much pride she has in her family’s name, which can make her come off as a bit stuck-up and ignorant, despite that she very well knows what her father has done with Schnee Dust Company. She refuses to admit it earlier in the series, which causes some tension between her and other characters on the show, particularly Blake (and the whole of the White Fang). Even her admission that her father is wrong is only a private admission about her reason for coming to Beacon and she still attempts to phrase it as a “moral gray area” rather than straight-up admitting that he enslaves Faunus and probably does all kinds of terrible things, including her vague admission that she received the brunt of his anger as a child. She still holds fast to her family’s name throughout the series and in terms of her own pride, can take a while to come around to new ideas because of her pride.
She's quick to judge others as well, even though she's been proven multiple times that her first impression of them is usually wrong. It seems that her overly quick judgment is probably one of the biggest flaws that she isn't able to overcome, despite her development as a person. In the beginning, primary instances of this include her immediate judgment that Ruby was not fit to be leader only one day after she was appointed and her assumption all faunus are like the White Fang until she had many hours after Blake went missing to think about it. Even after all of this was proven wrong, her immediate assumption regarding Sun’s reason for being outside their bedroom window was not that he is a Monkey faunus and therefore climbs trees all the time, but that he was snooping on girls. Her first judgment of Jaune persists throughout the series until she realizes that he was the one who talked to Neptune to get him to go to the dance with her (though to be fair, there was plenty of reason to believe that Jaune wasn’t someone she would be interested in based on his unrelenting and very bad flirting attempts). She even judges Oobleck toward the end of the second volume despite having never seen him fight before that, showing that despite that it becomes less about discrimination and pride, she still doesn’t lose that tendency to quickly judge other people based on her first impressions of them.
In a fight, Weiss’s tendency doesn’t focus on physical strength so much as precision and teamwork. This lack of physical strength is what got her nearly killed by the White Fang Lieutenant the second he got ahold of her. Earlier in the second volume, she was unconscious and out of the food fight simply from being knocked into a pillar when someone like Yang (focused on strength) got knocked through the ceiling both ways and landed on the ground and wasn’t unconscious. Her physical strength is the weakest in the team and also makes her the most frequently unconscious character in the show as she cannot take hard or heavy hits.
Weiss has a poor temper and a bad attitude when things don't go to her plans, which can result in quite a few sticky situations. She can be easily distracted from a dangerous situation as well, particularly when she's got temper issues. When she first meets Ruby, she doesn't pay attention to the dust as she's scolding her and Ruby sneezes and explodes them both. Later, when she's trying to fight a Boarbatusk in class, she gets frustrated at Ruby enough times despite that Ruby's not doing too much besides cheering her on and loses her sword for a moment. Though she does get her temper issues under control much better later on in the series, she still can be seen scoffing and copping an attitude while saying things like “And how do you propose we do that?” in the middle of a fight.
Another fun weakness? Weiss seems to be the most easy-to-surprise member of Team RWBY. When she runs into Penny, startled noises abound. Yang falls through the ceiling? She’s the only one to jump even though Yang wouldn’t have hit her while falling. Ruby jumping off of the bed in front of her shows some startled behavior as well.
Weiss is not exactly fabulous with the great outdoors. When they're going through initiation to find their teams, she keeps getting caught on bushes and smacking hanging vines out of the way. She can still function well enough and shows a better aptitude for handling it with training, but she clearly prefers cities and sidewalk. This goes hand-in-hand with her upbringing in Atlas as the heiress to the Schnee Dust Company, which also lead her to have a personality that doesn’t always put others’ feelings above what she wants to say. She can be rude and sometimes hurtful and not always realize what she said was bad.
Lastly, Weiss can be a bit of a gossip as shown at the start of volume 2 when she has apparently informed Team JNPR that Blake is a Faunus, despite that she doesn’t even like Jaune (their leader). This is despite the fact that she asks Blake to trust her even in the same episode and enforces the fact that Blake promised to tell them when something was up. She can also be a bit overly dramatic at times (ex: jumping on a chair and pointing at someone to accuse them of something) and can’t make a decent pun to save her life. Oh, and if turning into a baby-talking pile of mush when she sees a cute dog counts as a weakness, it's one she embraces.
Samples
Network/Action Spam Sample: A post from Genessia right before Weiss goes in for a canon update.
Prose Log Sample: Weiss Schnee was a hard worker and a go-getter, but there was one time of day that she did not particularly care to seize the moment during: morning. It wasn’t like she was one of those people who were god-awful in the morning and barely functional, but on the rare occasion she woke up to anything other than Ruby hanging over the side of her bunk and informing her that it was morning, Weiss’s preference was to stay snuggled in the comfort of her sheets. Which were, despite general regulation at the school, ones she’d brought herself because they had a much better material and thread count. It probably explained why she was comfortable to sleep in every morning despite her attitude toward just about everything else.
Or she would be, if she didn’t know that she had to be up for class. Weiss’s eyes peeked open and glanced at the time on her scroll. Thirty minutes before Ruby would normally get up and roll over to wake her up. Reaching over to lightly tap the alarm clock off that she had set just in case Ruby didn’t wake up one morning-- she was hardly going to depend solely on someone else for her own success-- Weiss pressed the palms of her hands to the mattress and pushed herself up. With one hand covering her mouth, Weiss let out a tiny, restrained yawn.
Ruby woke her up each morning, maybe it wouldn’t hurt if she got some coffee for her teammates this morning. Weiss slid her legs out from underneath the covers, slipping her feet into the slippers at the foot of her bed, before promptly having Ruby’s head slide right over the edge of the bunk and into hers. Clearly, Weiss wasn’t the only one who had risen early and she was paying for it in the form of a splitting headache. Her hand drew up to her forehead-- she assumed Ruby was doing the same, but she wasn’t bothering to check-- her eyes scrunched up.
“Ruby!” she shouted accusingly, as if it were entirely the other girl’s fault. Her eyes narrowed and she looked up at the younger girl’s face accusingly before standing up and facing her, hands on her hips and leaning forward. A scoff passed through her throat. “Have you ever considered looking before you fling yourself off your bed?!”
It was admittedly a good point, Weiss thought, since it wasn’t the only time that Ruby and she had nearly collided due to their leader’s tendencies to leap before she looked. If there was ever a reason to avoid seizing the mornings, it was the splitting headache resulting from anything other than Ruby’s obnoxiously loud greetings. Weiss didn’t bother to stick around to hear Ruby’s rebuttal, already having decided that it was far too early for something like this. She missed the luxury of her bed sheets already, but coffee would do. (And she supposed she could still bring back one with cream and five sugars for her partner to make up for being crabby first thing in the morning.)
Player name: Taylor
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Are you over 18: Yes.
Characters in The Box Already: None!
Character Information
Character Name: Weiss Schnee
Canon: RWBY
Canon Point: After the end of volume 2
History: Wiki
Personality: Weiss Schnee, heiress to Schnee Dust Company and huntress-in-training at Beacon Academy. Weiss's lineage plays a large part in who she is. She can be something of a spoiled brat, even reluctantly agreeing that she did tend to get everything that she wanted when she was growing up and had difficulties accepting that she couldn't always get that in the real world at first. This attitude reflected in her actions a lot, including the occasional penchant for arrogance; assuming Ruby was the wrong choice after one day of her being leader, refusing to do anything other than her own way in the very beginning, and a strong pride that is frequently challenged by the other characters-- both about herself and about Schnee Dust Company. Despite this pride and that she does take a bit of nudging to cooperate at times, along with a crabby and negative attitude, she's far from stubborn and has continued to adapt and evolve as she learns more about the world beyond the frame of the Schnee family.
One of the most important things to note about Weiss is that she's adaptable. She's got a strong ability to recognize her weaknesses (usually after a little help noticing them via someone else) and work on it. If there's something wrong with her, whether it be in a fight or in her behavior, she gets on changing it proactively. This is most noticeable after she accepts Ruby as the leader of the team once she's scolded by Professor Port for thinking she should have been the leader, then decides to become the "best teammate" possible and by volume 2, we see that she’s actually made progress on this, even changing her fighting style to support her team beyond just herself. Even in the very beginning of the series, she tells Ruby that she'll try to be less "difficult" and more "nice." It doesn't go as planned at first, but she continues to improve throughout the series, even starting to develop a more playful side that allows her to participate in food fights, board games, and (bad) attempts at punny jokes.
Another important instance of her ability to accept criticism and react appropriately is in regards to the issue of faunus discrimination once she and Blake made up at the end of the first volume. Though she is still unsure what she thinks about Sun, she makes a clear effort at that point to not discriminate against others just because they're a faunus even though she had very clearly made derogatory comments about them only an episode earlier. Her resistance to befriending Sun after that stems largely from his theft and apparent habit of climbing up to look through girls’ windows (he says it’s climbing that he does all the time, Weiss clearly thinks it’s something else). That said, she did have a history of discrimination when it comes to faunus and is actively trying to be better about it. By volume 2, she’s clearly friendly with Team CFVY and Velvet, a rabbit faunus, and is much better friends with Blake. Her racist streak against the Faunus came from her family being at war with the White Fang, a faunus extremist group, and growing up knowing nothing about them besides that the White Fang frequently kidnapped, killed, attacked, and stole from people she knew and cared about. On top of that, she states that her father’s anger about it made for a “very difficult childhood” though doesn’t explain much beyond that she (and likely her sister) suffered indirectly from the White Fang’s actions. Weiss’s discrimination against the White Fang spread to all faunus because of this. Until she met Blake, who she didn't know was a faunus before they became friends, that was her only experience with them. Getting to know Blake before she could discriminate against her likely played a big role in Weiss's ability to adapt her views to make an active decision to improve herself in this case. As with trying to be nicer to Ruby, it's unlikely that it completely disappeared due to deep-seated trust issues, but Weiss has made clear strides to become a better person.
...Not yet. But I'm still leagues better than you.”
Doing her best is something that Weiss always does. She's well aware that she's not perfect, which is a huge motivation for someone who's a perfectionist like she is. Weiss has the ambition to improve herself no matter what and appears to have a strong desire to achieve absolute perfection. A frequently angry father and being the heiress of a huge company probably meant that Weiss had a lot of pressure put on her and it shows in just how much she focuses on everything from being the first one to raise her hand and answer questions in class to excelling in combat, dust, glyphs, singing, organization, and planning. The last two of which she actually gets fairly excited about. Her excitement about the Vytal Festival and how much planning goes into it shows that she has a real interest in the managerial side of events, probably from growing up surrounded by the family business.
Weiss also happens to have a penchant for doing research before getting into things (shown when she tries to "spy" on Sun since he'll be in the combat tournament with them) and knowing when to back out. It's safe to say she'd rather err on the side of caution, to a point. Weiss was the first to call for retreat from the pack of Ursa and also suggested they avoid fighting the Nevermore and Death Stalker if they could complete their mission without doing so. Avoiding the fights that she can doesn't mean she's a coward though; she simply knew it would be less of a risk to do so. When it came down to the battle or saving Ruby, she fought without hesitation. That isn’t to say she doesn’t enjoy fighting either-- she does. When the girls are trying to decide which mission would get them closest to the White Fang, she immediately suggests they check “Search and Destroy” category missions over all other categories, even though they don’t know which mission would get them in the right area. All of them enjoy fighting and Weiss, despite her understanding of strategic retreat, is one of the team.
Weiss is also a regular girl who loves doing her nails, wearing (combat) skirts, and grew up wanting a bunk bed. This, in addition to her hesitance to speak with both Winter (her sister) and her father, indicates she may not have a great relationship with her sister either. The content of her theme song, Mirror Mirror, alludes to the fact that she was a fairly lonely person before she became a member of Team RWBY. Multiple characters have referred to friends that they had before arriving at Beacon, but Weiss never mentions anyone and even admits to, at least in the case of boys, not being able to take any show of affection seriously due to the fact that most of them want to get close to her because of her family name, rather than because of who she is as a person.
It also explains why she's so bad at getting along with everyone at first. Though Weiss catches on quickly enough, it's clear that getting along with others was never something she had to practice before then. Even after she’s started acting as part of the team, she shows a very distinctive lack of understanding regarding a board game that every other student there already knew how to play. Unfortunately, her newfound relationship with people who aren’t after anything from her yields Weiss’s tendency toward gossip. She’s only shown really telling something she shouldn’t once and at the very least seems to keep it within the team that they’re closest with, but it’s clear that she wasn’t supposed to say anything.
Except for instances like that, once she begins to get along with the other girls better, a playful attitude starts showing. She teases Ruby in a friendly way now, as opposed to her initial behavior of making fun of both her and Jaune. Contrast her original statement of "And we can paint our nails and try on clothes and talk about cute boys, like tall, blonde, and scraggly over there!" to the point near the end of the series when Penny says almost the same thing, quite seriously, to Ruby. Weiss jokes about Penny being "far more coordinated" than Ruby when Ruby asks if that's how she was when they first met. This is in the same scene that she low-fives Ruby over the two of them agreeing on fighting in skirts despite judgment from Blake. She also participates in a food fight, plays games, and even starts to participate and plan things like dances for everyone, rather than just focusing on the very specific self-serving atttitude that she came to Beacon with.
Speaking of dances: boys and dating. While Weiss is incredibly averse to most boys due to her experience with them being after her money rather than herself and can be incredibly crabby, she is not a “tsundere” despite what a surprising amount of fanart tries to claim. When Weiss is attracted to someone, it’s incredibly obvious. She doesn’t tell that person off for calling her cutesy nicknames, she doesn’t get snappy with them, and she doesn’t hide her feelings at all. Weiss is not the type of person to hide her feelings about much of anything, save for very specific and intentional circumstances regarding her behavior around her family and business. Weiss’s face lights up and she does whatever she can, being incredibly forward about her feelings and not hesitating to ask the person of her affections out-- even if it means moping when they say no afterward. On the other side of the coin, Weiss doesn’t have a problem telling boys no when she doesn’t desire their attention, so much so that it earns her the nickname “Ice Queen” amongst so many people that even her enemies start calling her by it. Whether that be normal verbal rejection or literally slamming a door in someone’s face after a serenade. She can definitely handle herself, and she does.
Weiss has a strong sense of justice, influenced heavily by war going on between her family and the White Fang. If someone's a thief, they're a thief and it's going to be hard to change that view no matter who or what you are. For a long time after she finds out what Blake had been hiding from them, she still complains about how she's going to be the one to be right to the others because "The innocent never run." Eventually she comes to the conclusion that she doesn't care about Blake's indiscretions because it was in the past, but anyone still acting that way in the future isn’t acceptable to her. That includes her own family’s indiscretions. Her father is not a good person and because of it, her family is accused of the enslavement of faunus and a whole slew of other questionable business practices. Weiss knows that there’s a lot of wrong that he’s done and while she has an intense amount of pride in her family, she knows that he isn’t a part of it. This is why Weiss tasks herself with restoring her family’s honor despite what her father did to it and righting all the wrongs that he inflicted upon the world of Remnant.
This is, in fact, her driving motivation for becoming a huntress instead of taking the easy route of a desk job in her home kingdom of Atlas. She claims that as soon as she learned she was capable of fighting, she knew that it was her responsibility to do what she could to protect people and change the way that things were. Just like Weiss changes as she learns the right way to do things, she wants to fix the damage that her father has done to her family name and change the world along with it. If she has to fight and become a huntress instead of living an easy life, she will, because that’s who she is. A noble, bright young girl with ambition enough to fight and intelligence enough to learn how to do it the right way… while learning what it’s like to understand others along the way.
Items on your character at canon point: Her regular outfit including her skirt, petticoat and other undergarments, shirt, bolero jacket, socks, boots, hands-free belted satchel, necklace, earrings, and a small crown hair accessory. She would also have Myrtenaster (her Multiaction Dust Rapier), extra vials of Dust (especially ice as she uses it most often), and her Scroll (basically their world’s version of a tablet and HP tracker).
Abilities:
Aura: In the world of Remnant, all creatures with a soul have an Aura. Aura is an extension of a person’s soul and when activated and properly honed, it acts as a shield, a weapon, and healing. It protects the user “like a force field" in the brilliant words of Jaune Arc. Realistically, it's an explanation for how characters can take so much damage without being fatally injured and functions like an HP bar. It's visible as an actual HP bar if one of the scrolls provided by Beacon are used. Aura can also heal wounds rapidly, making scars a very unlikely event as it would take wearing down a person’s Aura completely to cause them to be unable to heal from the damage. Aura is also what generates semblances, such as Weiss's glyphs, and can be used with weapons as a conduit for actual attacks. At one point, Weiss projects her aura into a swordfish during a food fight and uses it as an actual sword, showing that actual weapons are not the only things that can be used with Aura-- though they are certainly more effective. Aura can also react with Dust to create a multitude of effects and to control the Dust more effectively than just causing elemental explosions.
Dust: One of Weiss’s primary fighting methods is her use of Dust, far more advanced than most individuals due to her position as the heiress for the primary Dust-producing company in their world. Dust is effectively energy, starting in the four base elements of fire, ice, lightning, and wind. By combining those types of Dust, more types of Dust can be created and can be utilized for everything from an energy source to weaponry. The more mastery a person displays over Dust, the more creative and effective its use, and Weiss does it splendidly. However, since Weiss will not be capable of having a steady source of Dust in the Box, I will not go into detail about the different types of Dust and Weiss’s use of them beyond stating that she excels with the use of the ice element above all others, though she does carry 6 types of Dust in the revolver cartridges of Myrtenaster (her weapon).
Semblance/Glyphs: All of those who have a basic understanding and ability to use Aura exhibit a Semblance, or an ability unique to their soul that no other person has. Weiss’s Semblance is her glyphs. Glyphs are basically magic symbols that allow Weiss to perform various feats to enhance her fighting and defensive capabilities. Glyphs shown in-series include:
- +Air Step- A glyph she can use to reorient herself mid-air. Can be used to soften landings or change her direction when blown back by an attack or during a jump.
+Shield- Glyph that can be used to block attacks. (Used against the Boarbatusk in Professor Port's class.)
+Adhesion- Weiss used this during the fight against the Nevermore. It was able to hold Ruby like a sling against a wire set up by Blake and Yang until Weiss could aim Ruby at the Nevermore. It was used immediately after, showing the same effect but from a long distance when Weiss directed Ruby up the vertical side of a cliff using a succession of these glyphs so that Ruby could use her scythe to remove the Nevermore's head.
+Rejection/Repulsion/Launching- This glyph allows Weiss to launch something into the air. She uses this in the White Trailer to throw her enemy up into the air and when fighting the Giant Nevermore to launch Ruby toward it in conjunction with the slingshot formed by Blake and Yang’s use of Gambol Shroud.
+Speed Enhancement- This glyph has a clock-themed appearance. Weiss uses this glyph both on Blake during the highway fight and on herself during her fight against the White Fang Lieutenant and both times it significantly increases the speed of the person it is used on.
+Finishing Move from the White Trailer- At the end of the White Trailer, Weiss uses a glyph to perform something of a final attack. She first restrains the enemy by firing energy to five points using glyph magic to essentially "chain" and suspend the knight creature the wrists, ankles, and head. Weiss then launches herself up into the air and forward, slicing it through with Myrtenaster as it glows with glyph symbols across the pistol and blade, turning all of the dust in the chamber white as well. This shatters the enemy.
+Glyph Net (There are no official names for any of her glyphs besides Air Step, sorry)- This glyph is used in her fight against the White Fang Lieutenant after a speed enhancement. Weiss creates a dome of multiple miniature glyphs around the enemy, bouncing from one to the other and striking the enemy with each passing. It is unknown how this attack is completed as Weiss is interrupted by her being promptly grabbed by the face and slammed into the train floor during its only in-series use. It’s likely that she just goes and hits each of the glyphs in the net she created for multiple quick strikes and it is possible that she intended to finish the fight there, though it didn’t go as planned.
Swordplay/Fencing: Weiss’s abilities with a sword are precise, quick, and decisive. She’s incredibly adept with Myrtenaster and uses it mostly as a regular sword in battle, the only exceptions being her use of Dust. Unlike most other weapons in the series, her use of Dust is a largely elemental event rather than simply as ammo for a gun, despite her weapon’s design partially being modeled after a revolver. Her sword style is based on European fencing.
Versatility: Weiss is shown to be incredibly flexible with great reflexes. She performs flips, bends, and a multitude of high jumps that would normally only be capable of a gymnast with superpowers. She can jump off of a highway and land on her feet to perform an attack in the middle of traffic as well as dodge a chainsaw by flipping backward so that it just barely misses her stomach while she moves. And? She does it all in heels and a “combat skirt.”
Organization/Planning: Weiss comments once that Ruby stole her binder in reference to a 5” binder that was previously labeled “Vytal Festival Activities / Property of Weiss Schnee” complete with color-coded post-it tabs. Given that it was all Weiss’s work with Ruby having simply renamed it, it’s very clear that Weiss is incredibly detail-oriented when it comes to planning things out and keeping them organized. Her school work also is likely meticulous in the same way, explaining her exceptional position in the class as self-proclaimed smartest girl in the class.
Singing: In the White Trailer, Weiss is shown singing in a concert to a large audience as a solo singer. It is confirmed that she does in fact have a background in singing and that she is very good at it by Jaune Arc later in volume 2.
Strengths and Weaknesses:
Strengths
Weiss is a very intelligent character and self-proclaimed smartest student in her class. The title itself is unverified but considering how hard she works and her 5” binders, it’s likely to be true. It’s also supported by her forethought, observational, and planning skills, even going so far as to want to track down Sun Wukong upon first meeting him because he was from one of the schools that would be participating in an upcoming tournament. Her forethought is reflected clearly when she presents a special Dust cartridge that plays directly into Blake’s semblance for the train fight against Torchwick (again emphasizing her newfound focus on her team’s success, rather than just her own) within the mission, despite that they did not know that they would run into such a situation beyond what they had hoped. Weiss shows an aptitude for recognizing weakness and accepting constructive criticism after being given some time to process and is shown to be an incredibly adaptive person, developing her skills and focusing on becoming better whenever she recognizes something as wrong. Given that she is a perfectionist and her goal is literally stated at one point to be perfection, it’s easy to see why being able to accept criticism with only minor struggling with it is a strength in her case.
That said, Weiss is an incredibly hard worker. This likely stems from the fact that she is the heiress to Schnee Dust Company and has always had perfection expected of her because of it. She actively criticizes Ruby when Ruby goofs off in class and even makes sure to verbally note when Blake’s grades have been dropping, showing that her ambition for perfection extends beyond just herself. She also recognizes when they are out of their league, including suggesting that they retreat if a specific fight is unnecessary to achieve their goal. Weiss puts an emphasis on strategy more than punchy-smash-smash, which also plays into the fact that her speed, reflexes, flexibility, agility, and versatility are her strengths when it comes to her individual fighting talents.
Despite Weiss’s past Weiss-centric behavior, after making her decision to be the “best teammate ever” she actually developed a fighting style that focused significantly on supporting the other member of her team, as shown in the highway showdown between Team RWBY + Sun and Neptune versus Roman Torchwick in a mecha. During this fight she had been shown to have develop her glyphs to do things such as a speed increase glyph (used on Blake), visual cover when combining her Dust with Yang’s firepower to create a thick mist, using a glyph to pull one of her teammates out of the way of an attack, or even going so far as to sacrifice her footing to cast one on a teammate despite that it lands her face-first on the cement. Weiss is shown to be very creative with her use of her Dust as when she casts it around the group to act as a shield so they don’t all die when a tunnel collapses on them.
One of Weiss’s strengths is also her conviction and her sense of honor. She wants to live up to her family’s name, but she recognizes that her father has done wrong by it and by just about everyone else, particularly the Faunus. Weiss’s quest to regain that honor reflects in her sense of justice, which also is emphasized by her disdain for theft and any criminal activity, particularly that of the White Fang-- which has targeted her family since she can remember due to her father’s actions.
Weaknesses
Pride is probably one of Weiss's main personality flaws. At certain points, she refuses to admit that her family is wrong because of how much pride she has in her family’s name, which can make her come off as a bit stuck-up and ignorant, despite that she very well knows what her father has done with Schnee Dust Company. She refuses to admit it earlier in the series, which causes some tension between her and other characters on the show, particularly Blake (and the whole of the White Fang). Even her admission that her father is wrong is only a private admission about her reason for coming to Beacon and she still attempts to phrase it as a “moral gray area” rather than straight-up admitting that he enslaves Faunus and probably does all kinds of terrible things, including her vague admission that she received the brunt of his anger as a child. She still holds fast to her family’s name throughout the series and in terms of her own pride, can take a while to come around to new ideas because of her pride.
She's quick to judge others as well, even though she's been proven multiple times that her first impression of them is usually wrong. It seems that her overly quick judgment is probably one of the biggest flaws that she isn't able to overcome, despite her development as a person. In the beginning, primary instances of this include her immediate judgment that Ruby was not fit to be leader only one day after she was appointed and her assumption all faunus are like the White Fang until she had many hours after Blake went missing to think about it. Even after all of this was proven wrong, her immediate assumption regarding Sun’s reason for being outside their bedroom window was not that he is a Monkey faunus and therefore climbs trees all the time, but that he was snooping on girls. Her first judgment of Jaune persists throughout the series until she realizes that he was the one who talked to Neptune to get him to go to the dance with her (though to be fair, there was plenty of reason to believe that Jaune wasn’t someone she would be interested in based on his unrelenting and very bad flirting attempts). She even judges Oobleck toward the end of the second volume despite having never seen him fight before that, showing that despite that it becomes less about discrimination and pride, she still doesn’t lose that tendency to quickly judge other people based on her first impressions of them.
In a fight, Weiss’s tendency doesn’t focus on physical strength so much as precision and teamwork. This lack of physical strength is what got her nearly killed by the White Fang Lieutenant the second he got ahold of her. Earlier in the second volume, she was unconscious and out of the food fight simply from being knocked into a pillar when someone like Yang (focused on strength) got knocked through the ceiling both ways and landed on the ground and wasn’t unconscious. Her physical strength is the weakest in the team and also makes her the most frequently unconscious character in the show as she cannot take hard or heavy hits.
Weiss has a poor temper and a bad attitude when things don't go to her plans, which can result in quite a few sticky situations. She can be easily distracted from a dangerous situation as well, particularly when she's got temper issues. When she first meets Ruby, she doesn't pay attention to the dust as she's scolding her and Ruby sneezes and explodes them both. Later, when she's trying to fight a Boarbatusk in class, she gets frustrated at Ruby enough times despite that Ruby's not doing too much besides cheering her on and loses her sword for a moment. Though she does get her temper issues under control much better later on in the series, she still can be seen scoffing and copping an attitude while saying things like “And how do you propose we do that?” in the middle of a fight.
Another fun weakness? Weiss seems to be the most easy-to-surprise member of Team RWBY. When she runs into Penny, startled noises abound. Yang falls through the ceiling? She’s the only one to jump even though Yang wouldn’t have hit her while falling. Ruby jumping off of the bed in front of her shows some startled behavior as well.
Weiss is not exactly fabulous with the great outdoors. When they're going through initiation to find their teams, she keeps getting caught on bushes and smacking hanging vines out of the way. She can still function well enough and shows a better aptitude for handling it with training, but she clearly prefers cities and sidewalk. This goes hand-in-hand with her upbringing in Atlas as the heiress to the Schnee Dust Company, which also lead her to have a personality that doesn’t always put others’ feelings above what she wants to say. She can be rude and sometimes hurtful and not always realize what she said was bad.
Lastly, Weiss can be a bit of a gossip as shown at the start of volume 2 when she has apparently informed Team JNPR that Blake is a Faunus, despite that she doesn’t even like Jaune (their leader). This is despite the fact that she asks Blake to trust her even in the same episode and enforces the fact that Blake promised to tell them when something was up. She can also be a bit overly dramatic at times (ex: jumping on a chair and pointing at someone to accuse them of something) and can’t make a decent pun to save her life. Oh, and if turning into a baby-talking pile of mush when she sees a cute dog counts as a weakness, it's one she embraces.
Samples
Network/Action Spam Sample: A post from Genessia right before Weiss goes in for a canon update.
Prose Log Sample: Weiss Schnee was a hard worker and a go-getter, but there was one time of day that she did not particularly care to seize the moment during: morning. It wasn’t like she was one of those people who were god-awful in the morning and barely functional, but on the rare occasion she woke up to anything other than Ruby hanging over the side of her bunk and informing her that it was morning, Weiss’s preference was to stay snuggled in the comfort of her sheets. Which were, despite general regulation at the school, ones she’d brought herself because they had a much better material and thread count. It probably explained why she was comfortable to sleep in every morning despite her attitude toward just about everything else.
Or she would be, if she didn’t know that she had to be up for class. Weiss’s eyes peeked open and glanced at the time on her scroll. Thirty minutes before Ruby would normally get up and roll over to wake her up. Reaching over to lightly tap the alarm clock off that she had set just in case Ruby didn’t wake up one morning-- she was hardly going to depend solely on someone else for her own success-- Weiss pressed the palms of her hands to the mattress and pushed herself up. With one hand covering her mouth, Weiss let out a tiny, restrained yawn.
Ruby woke her up each morning, maybe it wouldn’t hurt if she got some coffee for her teammates this morning. Weiss slid her legs out from underneath the covers, slipping her feet into the slippers at the foot of her bed, before promptly having Ruby’s head slide right over the edge of the bunk and into hers. Clearly, Weiss wasn’t the only one who had risen early and she was paying for it in the form of a splitting headache. Her hand drew up to her forehead-- she assumed Ruby was doing the same, but she wasn’t bothering to check-- her eyes scrunched up.
“Ruby!” she shouted accusingly, as if it were entirely the other girl’s fault. Her eyes narrowed and she looked up at the younger girl’s face accusingly before standing up and facing her, hands on her hips and leaning forward. A scoff passed through her throat. “Have you ever considered looking before you fling yourself off your bed?!”
It was admittedly a good point, Weiss thought, since it wasn’t the only time that Ruby and she had nearly collided due to their leader’s tendencies to leap before she looked. If there was ever a reason to avoid seizing the mornings, it was the splitting headache resulting from anything other than Ruby’s obnoxiously loud greetings. Weiss didn’t bother to stick around to hear Ruby’s rebuttal, already having decided that it was far too early for something like this. She missed the luxury of her bed sheets already, but coffee would do. (And she supposed she could still bring back one with cream and five sugars for her partner to make up for being crabby first thing in the morning.)