Adam has a Human Parent

Parentage and names in RWBY are super important.

“Adam”, as a name, shows up in a surprising number of places in the allusions that RWBY makes, outside of its possession by an actual character. It’s a significant name. It’s also a really silly name.

In absolutely literal terms, ‘Adam’ is the ancient Hebrew word for ‘from mud’. However, contextually, it is also just the Hebrew word for ‘man’. Man is made from mud, and thus man’s name is 'mud’. So the story of Genesis is about a guy named 'Man’, in the same way that in a lot of myths and fables you’ll encounter animal characters whose names seem to just be their species. And it makes sense, if you’re the first and only one of your kind, that describing what you are and naming you are interchangeable.

So Adam, our radical Faunus freedom fighter, is walking around with the name 'man’. That’s kinda weird, isn’t it? The significant, symbolic use of the name Adam is nothing new- Mary Shelley stated that Frankenstein’s monster’s name was 'Adam’, and The Beast being named 'Adam’ is generally taken as an homage to the fact that despite his appearance, he is, in fact, a man. A human turned into a beast.

This seems significant.

Now, to change tacks entirely, let’s talk about Sienna Khan. Sienna Khan is overtly based on Shere Khan, the literally lame and huge jerk of a tiger who bullied the other animals in The Jungle Book. Shere Khan was very wary of Man and all that Man could do, and thus was extremely hostile to Mowgli, the man-cub living in the jungle among the animals, whether Mowgli had a problem with him or not. It turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, as Shere Khan’s constant aggression forces Mowgli to cause his death: in the orginal book, Mowgli leads Shere Khan into a trap with the help of his wolf brothers, and in a scene very reminiscent of Mufasa’s death, Mowgli stampedes a village’s cattle herd through a small canyon that Shere Khan has followed Grey Brother into. Shere Khan the mighty tiger is thus trampled to death by Man’s domesticated livestock.

Disney’s 1967 animated feature took a very different approach, and had Mowgli utilize Man’s red flower, the jungle animals’ term for fire, to bring about Shere Khan’s demise.

That Adam is a bull with a red flower on his back, and he personally stabs Sienna Khan in the front… that seems a little too on the nose to be accidental. Hmm.

Now, a lot of people who know Mowgli’s story are not aware of this: The Jungle Book is not a novel. It is an anthology of short stories. Also, there are two Jungle Books. The first Jungle Book has three short stories about Mowgli, and five others, some of them seeming to take place in the same setting as the Mowgli stories but others appearing totally unrelated. The best known of these other stories is Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, which is beloved in its own right. The Second Jungle Book has eight stories total, with five of them being about Mowgli, and the three remaining again a mixture of setting-compatible stories and unrelated ones.

Disney’s 1967 animated Jungle Book Movie is drawn almost entirely from the three Mowgli stories in the first Jungle Book, and many people seem unaware that Shere Khan’s death occurs relatively early in Mowgli’s adventures. The Mowgli stories in The Second Jungle Book are notably darker, and involve such plots as him working with Hathi the elephant to systematically destroy a human village in revenge, and a gruesome and bloody last stand battle of the wolfpack to hold their territory against an invading horde of dholes (also known as the asiatic wild dog).

One of the things that threw me off for the longest time about Menagerie as a setting was the use of characters from the Mowgli stories of The Jungle Book. Menagerie is a refuge for Faunus away from Humans. The Mowgli stories are about a jungle community that welcomes a man-cub into its den and raises him, and how he grows up to fight for them and lead them. These two settings… they’re just not thematically compatible. What’s the point of having Baghira and Shere Khan and Akela and Baloo and Kaa without, you know, Mowgli? Where is he?

Maybe you’re getting a sense of where I’m going with this.

I’d like you to consider something: in RWBY, there are already copious references to Greek mythology. Out of all the stories you have ever heard of ever, what is the single most iconic example of a humanoid character with the physical traits of a bull? It’s hard to argue it’s not The Minotaur of Crete. Do you know the story of the Minotaur of Crete? Crete is that little island nation in the southeast corner of the Mediterranian Sea, by the way.

Now before I go further, I want to address something: attempts at closely tying the characters of RWBY to particular allusions are often dismissed by referring to the creators’ statements that characters would not be following their inspirations’ stories “exactly”. I strongly believe that that was both a true and intentionally misleading statement. For example: Ironwood is overtly the Tin Woodman. This makes sense, as the Tin Woodman is a magical cyborg. But Ironwood is nominally Ozpin’s equal and privy to his secrets, while the Tin Woodman is just some… woodman, who is frightened of the Wizard just like the rest of Dorothy’s companions, and has no idea that the Wizard’s facade is fake. This might lead you to think that the allusion wasn’t really important… but then the creators go to the trouble of setting up scenes like this:



So, what I’m trying to say is… ‘exactly’ may not exactly mean ‘exactly’. Things can appear to be very different from their inspirations, which may make you think there’s nothing important there- but then they can also sometimes be very, very similar in spiteof those differences, and in totally unexpected ways.

But getting back to the story I was telling:

The Minotaur is a monstrous hybrid born to the bestial union of queen Pasiphae and a divine bull, after she cheats on her husband King Minos with his most prized livestock. Initially, Pasiphae accepted the child as her son, naming him Asterion and nursing him. But later, as he grew, he ‘became ferocious’, and she rejected him, and her husband locked him up in the Labyrinth as a monster.

We know something of how Faunus genetics work. The offspring of a human and a Faunus is typically a Faunus of the same type. It seems odd that, with all the Faunus we’ve met, the subject of intermarriage and its social acceptedness has never come up. It seems reasonable to expect that, somewhere in RWBY, there is going to be at least one Faunus character with a human parent.

In Disney’s 1967 animated adaptation of The Jungle Book, Mowgli is found abandoned in a wrecked canoe by Bagheera, who brings him to Raksha the Demon, a female wolf with a new litter. In the book, a naked and alone Mowgli wanders right up to Raksha’s den, after Shere Khan is implied to have killed his travelling parent(s) nearby. In either case, Raksha immediately takes to Mowgli; in the book, when Shere Khan appears shortly after and demands the man-cub be given up to him, it is Raksha the Demon who steps forward and defiantly faces the tiger, declaring that she will raise the man-cub as her own and fight anyone who tries to take him from her.

But Mowgli doesn’t stay with the wolfpack forever. In the books, well before Shere Khan is defeated, Bagheera and the wolves come to the conclusion that Mowgli’s presence causes too much strife, and that it is best for everyone involved that they go their separate ways. When Mowgli leaves the wolfpack and unsuccessfully tries to live among the humans, he finds himself contemptuous of the humans for their superstitions about the jungle and their fanciful tales about the animals who live there that he has known first-hand. And during this time, it is Grey Brother- the eldest child of Raksha the Demon- who is the only member of his adoptive jungle family who stays by his side.

In captivity, Asterion earns that epithet of 'monster’, killing and devouring all who enter his prison. He stops being even a semblance of a man, and becomes simply “The Minotaur”, to which the best and brightest youths of Athens are forced to be sacrificed as part of a cruel demand by Crete for reparations for past transgressions. And do you know how the Minotaur is finally defeated? Theseus, the hero, chooses to enter the Minotaur’s lair willingly, where so many others were forced to go. He seduces the daughter of the ruler of the island of Crete, Asterion’s own half-sister, and she tells him Asterion’s weaknesses and provides him with a plan, sword, and a long thread to find his way by in the Labyrinth. And Theseus walks right into the man-bull’s own 'home’, and beats him where he lives.

Now, maybe everything I’ve written here just sounds like a bunch of disconnected gibberish about some totally unrelated stories that couldn’t possibly be combined, but if you feel that way, I’d ask you- are they any less related than the Iliad and The Wizard of Oz? Or, to put it in other terms: are they any less related than a scythe, and a customizable, high-impact sniper rifle?