The Buried Moon

The Dead Moon isn’t popular, but it’s not so obscure only academics are aware of it- it’s the sort of story which is beloved specifically by people who are really, really into fairy tales, which are exactly the sort of people writing RWBY.

Furthermore, when I personally recognized The Dead Moon in RWBY it was only because RWBY isn’t even the first fairy tale mashup to use The Dead Moon as its framing mythos- the tragically unfinished webcomic No Rest For The Wicked, created by @andrael​, similarly tells a story set in a fairy tale mashup world in which the moon has disappeared and the creatures of darkness run wild unchecked because of it. In this case it is the extraordinarily sensitive titular princess of The Princess and the Pea who sets out on a quest to discover what has happened to the Moon and find a way to restore her to the sky, in order to cure her own insomnia.

The Dead Moon really is a tragically underappreciated story, dripping with potential for adaptation, and I’m amazed it’s remained so obscure for so long. With RWBY, I think perhaps its time has finally come.

And the history of the story is itself so fascinating! We owe the preservation of The Dead Moon entirely to the very high quality of anthropological work done with the Lincolnshire marsh people by the The Dead Moon’s recorder, Marie Clothilde Balfour, because if it weren’t for that body of consistently accurate work and her good reputation, such a very unusual story never could have been accepted as genuine by the academic folklore community. I am endlessly fascinated that we can trace the best, most complete version of the story we have directly back to a specific telling by a specific little girl, crippled and laid up in bed yet enthusiastically telling her own embellished version of the spooky story to Balfour as Balfour sat beside the bed scribbling it down furiously. When the story opens with: Long ago, in my grandmother’s time, the carrland was all in bogs, great pools of black water, and creeping trickles of green water, and squishy mools which squirted when you stepped on them.

Well, granny used to say how long before her time the Moon herself was once dead and buried in the marshes, and as she used to tell me, I’ll tell you all about it. …those are that little girl’s words specifically. (One source has her name as Bratton, but I’m not 100% confident on it.) Because of the way The Dead Moon’s usage within RWBY seems to frame all of the rest of RWBY’s plot within it, and the way RWBY emphasizes over and over again the importance of childhood stories, I am often seized with the whimsical notion that the entire story of RWBY is just one big imaginative embellishment on The Dead Moon, pouring out of that excited little girl sitting up in her bed in the dim light of a humble marsh village home over a hundred years ago, as Marie Balfour listens to her in rapt attention while writing as fast as she possibly can.