Title: Fighting for the Future
Author: Gladsome Praetorian
Rating: T at most
Genre: Action/Adventure
Status: WIP - 140k words, last updated june 13 2020
Library Category: Other Fandoms - misc - RWBY
Pairings: none
Summary: The world of Remnant knows Weiss Schnee as a family disgrace, hidden away in a mental institution in Atlas. Only she remembers what might have been.
Link: https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/fighting-for-the-future-rwby-time-travel-fic.822176/


This is timetravel story, or I guess a peggy sue. For me, these kinds of stories have to be done in a very precise manner. Threading the needle, I guess. For RWBY in particular, there’s a lot of baggage. But this story manages to tick off enough boxes for me to enjoy it.

The writing quality is good. It’s not flawless by any means, but unless your standards are so high, to the point where you can’t find any fanfiction to read at all, this should be acceptable by anyone standards.

The timetravel hits enough notes for me to like what was done. Like I said, RWBY has a lot of baggage, namely team RWBY. This author actually managed to go against fanon convention and send just a single person back and time (Weiss) rather than shoehorning the whole team at once. That’s a definite plus for me. And even better, the author doesn’t spend thousands of words trying to explain the timetravel process. It’s left purposefully vague, which allows the author to actually get on with telling the story and getting to the nitty gritty rather than having to deal with word bloat. She’s sent back something like 11 years, though the story starts 3 years pre-canon when she’s 14ish.

RWBY does have a lot of baggage, but it does have a lot of strengths. For one thing, it has really good side characters. Capturing the voice of these side characters is important in any RWBY fic, and the author manages it. Even with a bland character like Adam, seeing him humbled in a timely fashion is enough for me to enjoy him as the first mini-antagonist and he doesn’t overstay his welcome.

Alright, now onto the stuff that I guess I’m not a huge fan of. Which honestly really isn’t that much with this story. Often times as is the case, a story like this will hit you with a really good first few chapters and lead you into a false sense of security, and it's not until 20 chapters later that you realize that the story isn’t very good at all. I know there’s plenty of contradictors out there who will just come to that conclusion anyways, pretty much regardless of the content, but there’s not much anyone can do about it that.

And I get it. This is a story pulled from Spacebattles. Even bringing yourself to browse and read stories from Spacebattles, you have to set your expectations low. For me, I hate stories that have multiple, needless POV switches. But that’s literally every story on SB ever, so you sort of have to roll with the punches and accept that if you’re going to read any story there. So, I can complain about it, but I’m not going to mark the story down because of it. And honestly, it’s not nearly half as egregious as many of the other stories there, which relentlessly switch between POV’s to show the same scene over and over, like some realy bad such-and-such reacts Youtube video. At least here, it’s done as a part of worldbuilding, since the MC can’t be everywhere at once, as you see what her allies are doing while Weiss is doing her own thing.

It’s kind of refreshing, to be honest. This story has all the hallmarks of a traditional Harry Potter peggy sue, except for one. Weiss actually gets allies, and doesn’t try to accomplish literally everything by herself like an indy!Harry would. Those allies get things done as well. But the more that happens, the more they try to undercut Salemthe more the story diverges, and it’s going to be interesting when the story gets to a point where none of Weiss’s future information is usable.

Personally, I’ve found it hard of late (well, I guess this is a multi-year long thing at this point), to stay engaged with a fic. Most fics end up doing something stupid at some point or another and I lose interest. I probably have a 10% completion rate when it comes to published chapters in a story. But, I can say that I read everything here, and I actually want to read more. Whether that's because the story simply hasn’t gotten to that point because it’s still ramping up, who knows. I think a large part of it is simple because there’s no high school drama in this story. That won’t hold out forever, as the passage of time will bring everyone together at some point.

There doesn't appear to be any pairings yet. Not sure if that's going to change in the future. I will say though, RWBY fandom is pretty much all lesbian ships, and Weiss and Blake are best friends, so who knows.

If you're curious about the other schoolmates:

Spoiler

There was one interlude with Ren and Nora getting ambushed by bandits and just trying to scrape a living.
Ruby and Yang are seen like twice, as Qrow took Weiss under his wing.
Pyrrha is seen once, in an interlude with Winter, who herself is only seen a couple times)
Jaune hasn't even been mentioned once.
The story mostly revolves around Ozpin and his group. Aside from Weiss, Qrow is probably the second most seen character.

This story has a lot going for it that I enjoy though. It doesn’t get hung up on inane bullshit. There’s action scenes. Actions have consequences. Knowledge of the future is already diverging the story so it’s far from a canon rehash. There's cool aha! moments. The adults are actually proactive. Like I said at the start, the story manages to tick off enough boxes for me. 4/5

 

Though I am a bit more tolerant of faults when it comes to a Peggy Sue story, Anarchy hits pretty much all the same notes I have on this story.

The plot is quickly diverging from canon. You know, as it should be, because Weiss and Co are actually doing things about the future instead of some bullshit about "oh no, if we change things for the better and put ourselves in a better position we won't be able to predict things any more and let them go as badly as canon!".

I disagree about the PoV switches. As long as it's not happening half a dozen times per chapter and they actually contribute to story and character building I'm fine with them. I guess ASoIaF popularised the concept and people forgot to not abuse it.

Spoiler

I'm down for Weiss/Blake. I got so bored of Ruby/Weiss and Yang/Blake that I rarely even pick up a story marked as them now.

It's a 4/5 so far for me.

Also, wading through SB for stories is far easier than AO3 or FF.net. Yes, most stories there are shit, but less are shit than elsewhere.

 

In the interest of trying to get this out of for review, I'm bumping this with my thoughts. I agree that this story started strong but it has 2 major problems that prevent me from giving it a 4 star or higher.

The first problem is with the lack of conflict. Any challenge the characters face only serve to get characters to meet earlier and to develop stronger ties before the events of cannon kick off. Fights are interesting and well written but don't provide any tension and at know point did I feel like the characters were ever at risk.

The other problem is simply that it was abandoned before the story even got to the characters got to episode 1 of the cannon story. The pacing of this story and the location the author choose to start made it difficult. It's hard to care about this story when it never does anything with the premise by not getting far enough in for any changes to matter.

What is written is written well, and there are some interesting character and fluff but it isn't enough to save this fic for me. Solid 3/5, decent, enjoyable but not great.