Willow is the Winter Maiden

While the popular idea that Winter’s primary allusion is the Snow Queen is wrong, it isn’t far off. Willow is the Snow Queen.

Weiss’s plotline in Volume 4 was chock full of teasers for the eventual Atlas arc, and Willow is a big one…despite the fact that she doesn’t appear. In fact, it’s because she doesn’t appear.

Whitley: “I heard father shouting with someone in his study earlier.“

Weiss: “Mother?”

Whitley: “No, she’s already drinking in the garden.”

It’s the fact that Willow is explicitly stated to be around that has this being more than just Missing Animated Mom Syndrome, because if she weren’t going to have any role in the story it would have been much easier to just write her out. But Whitley and Weiss call direct attention to the fact that she’s here, in the Schnee manor, unseen.

The Snow Queen actually barely appears in the story that’s named after her, and when Gerda arrives at her palace near the end of the story she isn’t even home. Gerda, incidentally, is highkey one of Weiss’s main allusions, probably the one with the biggest impact on her narrative. Basically everything Weiss’s semblance does is something that Gerda did on her long adventure in The Snow Queen. Yes, even the Knight.

Back to Willow. Another thing about the Snow Queen is that she isn’t really a person so much as an embodiment of the winter season. She’s not a villain: she’s a force of nature. She’s winter’s cruel indifference, not just uncaring but not even noticing the suffering that she brings.

You know who’s another supernatural embodiment of winter? Jack Frost. Unlike the Snow Queen, Jack Frost is a mischievous, sadistic trickster. L. Frank Baum, best known as the author of The Wizard of Oz, actually wrote a little-remembered fictional biography of Santa Claus called The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus in which St. Nick befriends Jack Frost under the impression that his pranks would make winter more whimsical in a good way…rather like Nicholas Schnee mistakenly thought Jacques Gele would make a good protector of his legacy. To quote:

"Jack Frost is the whimsical, capricious, mischievous, treacherous and sadistic aspect of winter. The Snow Queen is winter’s stark and serene beauty, its calm stillness, its inhospitability, its unrelenting scale, and its cruel indifference to tragedy."

If that doesn’t describe Weiss’s home life to a T, I don’t know what does. So that establishes Willow is the Snow Queen. How does that make her the Winter Maiden?

Well, aside from the whole “based on a supernatural female embodiment of the season of winter” thing, there’s something else. While RWBY’s allusions tend to primarily draw from the original sources, they also usually take something from the Disney versions too. Disney were right to call Frozen inspired by the Snow Queen rather than an adaptation of it, because the two share almost no similarities in their plot. But one thing it did was make the Snow Queen into an actual person with motivations. Like her inspiration, Elsa is unseen in her own home, an emotional recluse hidden from the world. But unlike her inspiration, Elsa has a personal reason for being so distant. What is that reason?

She secretly has magic ice powers.