Adam has Silver Eyes

It has been heavily hinted within RWBY that Adam Taurus is a Silver-Eyed Warrior.

Let me explain:

Now, it’s a little unfair of me to call the hints ‘heavy’, as almost all the hints are given through complex symbolism. However, if you’ve figured out the meaning of the symbols being used, it’s so blatant as to be like taping a giant sign to Adam’s back that says “Hey Silver Eyed Warrior Right Here!” (rather literally, actually). But without an understanding of the symbolism, most of the hints are completely inscrutable. The first piece of the puzzle is understanding who Summer Rose is primarily based on, one of many, many allusions made in RWBY that the creators keep mum about, leaving the audience to try and decode the series for themselves. My own reading of RWBY is that Summer Rose is unquestionably based upon the titular character of an obscure fairy tale titled The Dead Moon.The story of The Dead Moon has a fascinating background that kind of makes it a darling of people who are really, really into fairy tales and folk literature. The Brothers Grimm inspired other contemporaries with their work collecting and publishing fairy tales, and one of those contemporaries was Joseph Jacobs, who wanted to do for English fairy tales what the Grimms had done for German ones. Jacobs gathered and published his own collections, and is responsible, just for example, for putting down the best known version of Jack and the Beanstalk. (“Fee Fie Foe Fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman!”)

Jacobs gathered his stories from a variety of sources, including other folklorists, and The Dead Moon actually comes from the work of a woman named Mrs. M. C. Balfour. Balfour went into the Lincolnshire Carrs, an English wetlands region, and lived with the poor rural people there and recorded their unique culture. In one house she found a bedridden, crippled little girl with a morbid imagination, and the little girl recounted to Balfour in grotesque detail the story of The Dead Moon. Balfour suspected the little girl had embellished the tale, but she was not the only source for it, so Balfour took it as genuine and recorded it as closely as possible, in the native dialect in which it was told to her- and so it is directly from this particular forgotten little crippled girl that we have the best and most complete version of The Dead Moon, and the narration of the story reflects that particular telling.

The story as recorded was so unusual that at first Balfour’s contemporaries were highly skeptical of its authenticity. Despite being recorded from the oral tradition of 19th century English peasantry, The Dead Moon is distinctly mythological in character, concerning a goddess and explaining natural phenomena, traits very atypical of fairy tales. Only because it was embedded within the body of Balfour’s work studying the people of that region, which was found to be reliable, was the story eventually accepted as the genuine article, and it later came to be suspected of being an indication of former moon worship within the marshes. Jacobs then took the story from Balfour’s published notes, translated it from the impenetrable dialect of the marsh people into standard contemporary English, streamlined some of the more loquacious descriptions, and changed the title slightly to soften it, before publishing the story in one of his collections as The Buried Moon. Jacob’s version is by far the best known and in my opinion most readable version of this obscure tale, but my personal preference is strongly in favor of the original title, which I use here.

The Dead Moon tells the story of a feminine personification of the moon, who is a very kind and selfless person who stays awake all night in order to shine her light that drives away the creatures of darkness that lurk in the bogs and prey upon the people of the marshlands. Having heard so often of the ill done by the bog monsters, but never having encountered them herself because she was safe up in the sky and protected by her own light, the Moon decides she wants to see for herself how bad things really are, and whether there is anything she can do about it. On the dark night of the new moon, normally the only night when the Moon allows herself to sleep, the Moon steps down to Earth in human form, draping a hooded cloak over herself and pulling it closed to hide the light that shines from her and disguise her identity, before setting off into the bogs to see what she can see.

But not long after entering the bogs on foot to investigate them, the Moon finds herself caught by the grasping branches of a haunted tree. While the Moon struggles to get free, a frightened, lost man stumbles upon her in the darkness. Trying to save him, the Moon lets loose her light, briefly driving away the creeping horrors and showing him the path out of the bogs so he can flee- but sacrificing her own chance at escape in the process by revealing herself to the light-fearing creatures of the bog as The Moon, their old, much hated enemy, who they instantly recognize and fall upon. Overwhelming her, the bog monsters drag the Moon to the bottom of one of the deep black pools of the bog, and roll a giant stone on top of her to keep her from rising, burying her alive underwater. With the Moon gone, the nights remain pitch black, and all the monsters of darkness enjoy a long reign of terror until the people of the marshlands band together to discover what has happened to the Moon and find a way to restore her to the sky.

Given this reading of Summer Rose as The Dead Moon, a character who is literally the moon in the sky, suddenly all the seemingly gratuitous moon imagery used within RWBY starts to jump out at you as actually having a meaningful context. In the World of Remnant, the moon is dead, killed before the story begins just like Summer Rose. Just like in the tale of The Dead Moon, the absence of the woman who can shine the light that drives the monsters of darkness away leaves the people vulnerable and forces them to suffer the predations of those monsters. By this reading, the light shined by Silver-Eyed Warriors is the natural light of the luminous personified Moon, and it doesn’t take a leap of logic to then say: Silver-Eyed Warriors derive their power from the shattered moon of Remnant. They are moon warriors. The amount of imagery in RWBY associating Ruby Rose with the moon is ridiculous, but in the Volume 2 intro they actually go so far as to show Ruby falling through space to the surface of Remnant from the moon.

What does all this have to do with Adam Taurus? Well, I’m getting there.

While Summer Rose and Ruby Rose are strongly symbolically associated with the moon in RWBY, they have another symbolic association which is just as strong and much more overt: Roses. Their family name and Summer’s given name are drawn from “The Last Rose of Summer”, a poem about the tragedy of being the last of one’s kind, and whose titular rose could be argued to represent either Summer Rose or Ruby Rose. Summer’s epitaph, “Thus Kindly I Scatter”, is taken from this poem, and the imagery of scattered rose petals occurs over and over and over again throughout RWBY. Summer and Ruby’s family name, their emblems, their color themes, and the scattering petal visual effect associated with them- all these things point to ‘Rose’ not just being their name, but their essential symbolic identity. Now, this is where RWBY’s symbolism gets really clever. Moon imagery and rose imagery are juxtaposed ubiquitously within RWBY, starting from the very first moment of the series: The number of times that an image of the moon has a rose or rose petals in front of it in RWBY is so large that it’s difficult to count. And if Summer Rose is The Dead Moon, then it makes sense for these two symbols to consistently appear together, because Summer Rose is both the Moon and a Rose. Even the verbs commonly applied both literally and figuratively to these two symbols within RWBY- shatter and scatter- are conceptually related and only a single letter apart. In “Red Like Roses Part II”, Summer Rose actually describes herself as “forever shattered”. Thus, whenever you encounter either the moon or a rose within RWBY, they are symbolizing the same thing- which means they are interchangeable. Wherever you see the moon, you can substitute a rose; wherever you see a rose, you can substitute the moon. The Moon is a Rose; the Roses are Moons. So: what’s the name of Ruby Rose’s weapon? This is the “rose code”: in RWBY, the symbolism of the moon and the symbolism of roses are identified with each other, and one regularly stands in for the other. Now, going back and looking at Adam Taurus again with all this in mind: Adam is plastered all over with the exact same combined shattered moon and scattered rose symbolic imagery used for Summer and Ruby. His weapons are named Wilt and Blush, and his semblance that he uses them to activate is named Moonslice. He first uses his semblance in front of a giant image of the shattered, scattered moon, as he shatters and scatters his enemy.

Adam’s entire back is covered with a huge image of his emblem, a red rose in front of a white field, evoking the rose-over-moon symbolic juxtaposition associated with Ruby and Summer. In the Volume 1 intro, a ghostly image of Adam’s face appears superimposed over the moon while Blake stands in a tree in the Forever Fall.

And finally, of course, Adam Taurus never, ever lets us see his eyes.