Colosseum's attack on Mistral

Star Wars
So the Death Star: A massive, just almost unimaginably huge craft. Which is circular. And is used as a superweapon to tragically destroy the peaceful paradise of Alderaan, in order to establish just how serious things are and how low the villains will eagerly sink.

The Amity Colosseum is far, far larger than any other flying craft we see. (Also, Vytal = Life. The opposite of Death. The Vytal Festival Colosseum is an inverse Death Star.) Which Cinder turns it into a weapon in order to destroy Beacon.

Now, during the Battle of Beacon, the Colosseum is evacuated and we never see it retaken. In fact, we're told the school itself has never been retaken, and remains infested with Grimm.

Considering the Atlesian forces utterly lost air superiority during the battle and we see almost every craft of theirs on screen go down, and the school itself was never retaken, the notion that a mission to retake the Colosseum was launched and conducted off-screen seems highly dubious.

Furthermore, Arthur Watts, who bears a passing resemblance in body and manner to Grand Moff Tarkin, the strategic mastermind behind the creation of the Death Star, created the malware used by Cinder to seize control of the Atlesian command network, and there was no Atlesian technology we saw exposed to it that it was not able to completely control.

Now, there's another massive craft from Star Wars the Colosseum bears an even stronger resemblance to, and that's Cloud City, an independent mobile settlement the Empire invades, captures, and repurposes for its own use. One of the notable plot points that happens on board Cloud City is that C-3P0 (P3N-3) is blasted into pieces by hidden agents of the Empire, and it's some time before the protagonists find their droid companion again, even in pieces. When they do, they reactivate him, and carry him around during a running fight on board Cloud City, not being able to fully repair him until afterwards.

Penny
The episode where Penny is destroyed is titled 'PvP'. In the fight between Pyrrha and Penny, they are shown to be evenly matched.Pyrrha is the 'P' in JNPR.

Penny's name also starts with a P.

JNPR needs a new fourth member.

Who has interacted with Penny more in RWBY Chibi than any character other besides Ruby?

Who has had seven sisters already? The first skit with Penny in the show proper (not a trailer) is primarily Penny and Jaune interaction. They have fantastic chemistry.

"I look forward to emotionally bonding with you, teammates!"

Can that be any more foreshadowing?

Anyway! Back to the colosseum!

So, you know what happens when Luke Skywalker makes the trench run to take out the first Death Star?

His droid partner riding behind him gets trashed.

So. Jaune is our luke, for a laundry list of reasons. He needs a new partner, one strong enough to fill Pyrrha's anchor spot on team JNPR, who won't needle any of his many insecurities, and who won't put him in an awkward romantic position while he's still grieving for Pyrrha.

Penny is perfect for him. She's probably the only person more awkward than he is, and someone who would actually look up to him and who he could feel useful to by helping her integrate into society.

And again, Penny still needs to get herself disentangled from Atlas so that she can be a free person and have a chance to live her own life. But! If Atlas never recovered her body from the Colosseum, and they've now recalled all their agents and closed their borders, then Atlas has already effectively cut all of Penny's strings.

So, there's another time when the heroes invade the Death Star. While trying to reach Alderaan to make contact with the Rebellion and deliver the Death Star plans to Princess Leia, Luke (Jaune), Obiwan, (Pyrrha, whose semblance is literally just The Force), Han (Nora), and Ren (Chewbacca) end up running into the mysterious and terrifying Imperial Battlestation which is so incompregastingly large they think it must be a moon. They get sucked in, they end up landing, they start to work on a way to escape.... and then they discover something crazy:

While they're waiting in the control room and Kenobi goes off to disable the tractor beam, R2 scanning through the computer system discovers that Leia is being held prisoner on board the Death Star. This immediately completely redirects the plot.

"The Princess?! She's here?!"

What starts out as just an escape for survival becomes a rescue mission for someone who's been trapped since the beginning of the movie.

RWBY fans will often comment that they don't want Penny to just come back because that will cheapen her death, or they want her to come back with no memories.

What none of them seem to consider is that Penny is still a Prisoner of Salem's forces, and we are going to get to SAVE HER.

And you know what that symbol is?



It’s a pretty standard symbol for the power button on computers when its a pushbutton rather than a toggle.

On two-position switches, the circle is the open circuit position and the line is the closed circuit position.

The combined line-circle symbol is for a pushbutton toggle that interrupts the circuit.

The version of the symbol with the line cutting through the circle, the version that appears on Penny's swords, is the standby symbol, and it indicates a circuit that will not be broken by pressing the switch. It indicates a toggle between an 'on' and 'standby' position.

Essentially, it means a computer that does not shut down entirely, but merely sleeps.

They're going to find Penny, and they're going to fix her.

Yavin 4 and Mistral


Mistral and the rebel alliance based within the temple complex on Yavin IV share many visual, stylistic, and structural themes.

If V3 was the destruction of Alderaan

Then V4 was the desperate race of Leia, Luke, Han, and Chewie to reach Yavin 4, as they believed that to be the rebellion's last best hope.

Yes, the Nuckelavee video is bizarre. It still feels to me like they were trying to recapture that fight scene and it just... didn't quite work.

So now the Death Star has to follow them to Yavin 4, and they need to stand up against it once and for all.

Joan of Arc
She showed up out of nowhere, went to the dauphin or French heir-apparent, and said 'I am on a mission from god, please let me lead the French forces'. And the French were so desperate and demoralized, they let her try.

I'm oversimplifying, but the thing you realize reading her story is that what she did really was miraculous, and that's why people were willing to believe her when she said god was telling her what to do.

Her death absolutely was not the turning point, quite the opposite- her very real and substantial victories on the battlefield were the turning point.

The blue part is what is left of France.

They had lost Paris.

Orleans was the last stronghold of any note, and it had been under a long siege by the English at this point considered unbreakable, which the English being very thoroughly entrenched and the fall of the city considered just a matter of time.

Joan, having convinced a commander of a garrison near her home that she was worth paying attention to through great perseverance and relentless entreaties and demonstrations of remarkable knowledge and wit, with a small escort made a perilous journey first to meet the dauphin, Charles, similarly impress him, and then make a further perilous journey to reach Orleans, pass the English siegeworks, and enter the city.

Charles seems to have been both impressed and bemused by her, and again the situation was so hopelessly desperate he was willing to try anything- even if she was a fraud, she might briefly improve the abysmal morale of the troops.

One of the remarkable things about Joan was the consistency with which she described her visions from God, which always involved the same three saints:

“At her trial, Joan stated that she was about 19 years old, which implies she thought she was born around 1412. She later testified that she experienced her first vision in 1425 at the age of 13, when she was in her "father's garden" and saw visions of figures she identified as Saint Michael, Saint Catherine, and Saint Margaret, who told her to drive out the English and bring the Dauphin to Reims for his coronation. She said she cried when they left, as they were so beautiful.” (From Wikipedia )

I'm not going to get into this here, but take my word for it: Ren is St. Michael, Nora is St. Margaret, and Pyrrha is so St. Catherine it hurts.

The siege of Orleans had gone on for seven months. When Joan arrived, she immediately advised a series of aggressive counter-attacks on the English siegework fortifications, which she personally lead carrying a banner at the head of French forces.

The siege was lifted in a week.

“The extent of her actual military participation and leadership is a subject of debate among historians. On the one hand, Joan stated that she carried her banner in battle and had never killed anyone, preferring her banner "forty times" better than a sword; and the army was always directly commanded by a nobleman, such as the Duke of Alençon for example. On the other hand, many of these same noblemen stated that Joan had a profound effect on their decisions since they often accepted the advice she gave them, believing her advice was divinely inspired. In either case, historians agree that the army enjoyed remarkable success during her brief time with it.

The appearance of Joan of Arc at Orléans coincided with a sudden change in the pattern of the siege. During the five months before her arrival, the defenders had attempted only one offensive assault, which had ended in defeat. On 4 May, however, the Armagnacs attacked and captured the outlying fortress of Saint Loup (bastille de Saint-Loup), followed on 5 May by a march to a second fortress called Saint-Jean-le-Blanc, which was found deserted. When English troops came out to oppose the advance, a rapid cavalry charge drove them back into their fortresses, apparently without a fight. The Armagnacs then attacked and captured an English fortress built around a monastery called Les Augustins. That night, Armagnac troops maintained positions on the south bank of the river before attacking the main English stronghold, called "les Tourelles", on the morning of 7 May. Contemporaries acknowledged Joan as the heroine of the engagement. She was wounded by an arrow between the neck and shoulder while holding her banner in the trench outside les Tourelles, but later returned to encourage a final assault that succeeded in taking the fortress. The English retreated from Orléans the next day, and the siege was over.” (From Wikipedia )

Amity Colosseum, the "Vytal Arena"
It is a flying fortress captured by the enemy, the ideal siege engine to employ against Mistral, a city constructed on extremely mountainous terrain on the shore of a landlocked inland sea, which has been stated can only be meaningfully assaulted from the air.

In both Star Wars and the legend of Joan of Arc, their is a heavy siege of a great old city of culture, being defended by a demoralized populace who have already lost major battles and territory, who must face overwhelming attacking forces entrenched in their own siege fortifications.

In both of these battles, the defenders' situation is widely considered to be hopeless.

Then a random kid shows up from nowhere along with a crazy plan for an aggressive counter-attack, everybody buys into it out of desperation, and they ride out against the enemy fortress and take them completely unprepared in a miraculous turnabout.

That's the Battle of Yavin, that's the Siege of Orleans, and heck some parts of it pretty well line up with some of the stuff from Mulan.

Oh, and like, as a final note: after Pinocchio dies by hanging? The Blue Fairy calls together a bunch of talking animals to go rescue him from the big high oak tree where his body is hanging and bring him to her so she can nurse him back to health.

And that's why I think the Colosseum is going to attack Mistral in V6, with Arthur Watts at the helm, and QORNJRWBY is going to rescue Penny's shiny metal butt in the process of stopping it, and she'll bond with Jaune while he's running around with her strapped to his back and then after they repair her she'll volunteer to help them reform team JNPR.