Fanfic / Wise as an Old Qrow

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Cover Art by Aristeo-Storm

Wise as an Old Qrow is a Mental Time Travel RWBY fanfic by Coeur Al'Aran where in a battle with Tyrian Callows, Qrow Branwen is sent back into the past when he was a young child in the tribe of thieves and killers.

Wise as an Old Qrow contains examples of the following...

• Abled in the Adaptation: After Qrow helps Maria in her fight with Tock, they successfully defeat her without losing Maria's sight.
• The Ace: While in canon he was seen as one of the best huntsman in Vale, now sent back in time to face petty bandits and children, Qrow easily beats any enemy he finds with the only limitation being his younger body. At Signal and even into Beacon, despite his best efforts to blend in and avoid becoming a Grade Skipper for Raven's sake, he still ends up being seen as a prodigy by staff and students.
• A-Cup Angst: Gretchen is quite jealous of having smaller breasts compared to the other girls.
• Adaptation Dye-Job: Weirdly, Jacques Gele is introduced as being blonde instead of his canon portrayal having black hair before it either turned due to stress or he dyed it white.
• Adaptational Wimp: In canon, the Apathy are Immune to Bullets and even fire doesn't seem to harm them. In this version, they're easily killed by a simple blade if one can kill them faster than their energy-draining effect can take told.
• Adaptation Name Change:
  • Raven's eviler and more sadistic predecessor as leader of the bandit tribe was originally mentioned in Arc Royale, where he was named as Bosnan, but in this fic his name is changed to Balmung, although they otherwise come across as the same characters.
  • Professor Peach, whose full name in canon was "Thumbelina Peach", here is now is "Nessa Peach".
  • Highly downplayed In-Universe when Raven gets her weapon in the new timeline, rebuilt by Qrow from his memories of the old timeline as a make-up present. Despite Qrow insisting it's called Omen, Raven is so touched and grateful to her brother for it that she and her friends instead take to calling it Bromen, to Qrow's annoyance.
• Adaptation Relationship Overhaul:
  • Invoked, In-Universe. In the alternate timeline, Qrow takes steps from the start to ensure that his relationship with Raven will not deteriorate to the point of the two disowning each-other. In the original timeline, Raven was forced to shove down her own grief and fill the role of the "elder twin", taking care of a soft Qrow herself after their parents' deaths, and she clearly grew to resent this as they aged and even more when Qrow kept siding with Ozpin and their teammates over her; whereas in the new timeline, it's Qrow with his older self's mind and knowledge who has stepped up to the role of "elder twin" taking care of Raven and steering them towards a better life years earlier, and he's making a point to avoid making her feel unheard. The result is that Raven now looks up to Qrow as the "elder sibling" (even if she'll sooner chew her own arm off than be caught openly admitting it), and the twins are definitely close in their teen years, despite all the snarking and insulting they throw each other's way.
  • In canon, Qrow was a huge fan of the Grimm Reaper and chose to wield a transforming scythe to imitate the latter's own dual kamas. This Qrow meets her while she's active (on her ill-fated last engagement in fact) and has no idea who she is, the weapon connection left unmentioned.
  • Qrow was never indicated to have much of a relationship with Amber apart from being her protector. Here, they basically become Like Brother and Sister with how close they become, to the point of basically adopting her after her grandmother Tier dies of old age.
• Age Lift: Coeur intentionally does a little fudging with ages to put established characters in the same peer group and fill out the roster without having to make up characters or conspicuously not make up characters.
  • Here Peter Port is in the same year group as Team STRQ, whereas in canon Port was already employed at Beacon as a Teaching Assistant at that time.
  • Here Willow Schnee is a year younger than the members of Team STRQ; while Willow's age isn't stated in canon, her eldest daughter's age is. With Winter being 5-6 years older than Weiss, it's unlikely that Willow is younger than the members of Team STRQ.
• Ambiguously Evil: Lionheart; his brief appearances leave it unclear if he's defected to Salem yet, and Qrow is very wary of him.
• Ambiguous Situation: From when exactly Qrow has come back to the past isn't entirely clear, as Qrow has fought Tyrian multiple times and there's conflicting evidence that could suggest any of them. He's only been poisoned by Tyrian the one time in Volume 4, but another poisoning could be the Point of Divergence from canon, and Qrow consistently knows information that he canonically only learned after the Volume 4 incident.
• Ascended Extra: Gretchen Rainart, Ms. Peach, Peter Port and Willow Schnee all become part of Qrow's friend group. Port and Willow were only minor characters in RWBY canon with a small number of appearances, while Gretchen and Peach never even appeared onscreen in the show.
• Avenging the Villain: One of the primary motivators for Lappy defecting from Salem's forces and going after Qrow is to avenge Tock's murder at his and Maria's hands, as he genuinely loved her.
• Beware the Nice Ones: After a couple of weeks of constant bullying, Raven confronts Summer on Qrow's fixation on her. Summer snaps when Raven starts to insult her and is suddenly pulled off of Raven with her knuckles bloody. Summer consistently trounces Raven if she's angry, such as punching Raven in the gut hard enough to cause her to vomit after Raven runs away from Beacon to get answers from her former tribe about the orphanage of dead kids.
• Big Brother Instinct: While he's the younger twin, a mentally older Qrow in his younger body uses his knowledge and skills to help his sister and him find a better life.
• Bizarre Dream Rationalization: After Qrow inexplicably wakes up in his younger self's body back on the day when his and Raven's parents died, naturally, one of the first explanations that come to his mind is that he's dreaming, and he wonders if Tyrian's attack on him before he woke up in the past put him in a coma. Qrow dismisses those possibilities when his time in his past self's body goes on and he realizes the entire experience is far too linear, too consistent, too long-feeling and too real-feeling to be a dream.
• Break the Haughty: In the lead-up to the Vytal Festival being hosted for the first time in Mountain Glenn, Qrow gets an opportunity to do this with the visiting Atlesian teams —after getting acquainted with a young James Ironwood, who uses false pretence to get a measure of him and later humiliates another school’s Faunus student in a spar to the smug approval of his classmates, Qrow (himself fed up with Atlas’ scapegoating the still-peaceful White Fang as terrorists and their people’s blind belief in this) offers himself to a bout. Unarmed, he deals Ironwood a Curb-Stomp Battle, leaving him shaken with his Aura shattered and wiping away the Atlesians’ smiles.
• Bullying a Dragon: Raven actively seeks out this trope as a teenager, to Qrow's exasperation. Since she's obsessed with strength and getting stronger, she actively seeks out students in Signal and then Beacon that are stronger than her, including upperclassmen, and she antagonizes them into pulverizing her.
• Child Prodigy: Qrow in the past appears to others to be a prodigy, due to him having all the engineering and practical skills of a well-trained and highly experienced 40-something huntsman, despite his failed efforts to hide it; and he's easily at the top of almost all of his and Raven's classes.
• Clueless Chick-Magnet: Taiyang doesn't seem understand how much girls like him. Neither does Qrow.
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist: Qrow in the past timeline encounters several of the human/Faunus generals whom Salem was employing in his generation before their counterparts in Team RWBY's generation, among them Tyrian's "predecessor", Lappy. Tyrian and Lappy are both demented, vicious, cunning and sadistic Faunus who wield dual blades in combat, and walk away from their first fights against Qrow permanently maimed. Tyrian was a monochromatic-themed scorpion Faunus with black hair and wide, expressive eyes and an Aura-cutting Semblance, whereas Lappy is a golden-haired dog Faunus with far narrower and less scrutable eyes, and a Grimm-manipulating Semblance. Tyrian is (presumably) maimed by losing the tip of his tail in his fight against Qrow like in canon, whereas Lappy is maimed when half his face is melted off by acid during his fight with Qrow. Tyrian canonically shows no genuine concern for any of his colleagues, only for their master Salem, whereas Lappy eventually professes to have genuinely loved Tock. Notably, Lappy shows as the fic goes on that he prominently lacks each of the redeeming qualities Tyrian is usually written with in Coeur's fics, and is more vindictive and vengeful than Tyrian.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Raven begs Qrow to stand down from fighting the tribe's leader and second, knowing that it would be a complete slaughter. It is. Qrow dances around his adult opponents' clumsy flailing and kills one, then the other, in minutes without taking a scratch beyond a surprise attack before the fight starts.
• Death by Adaptation: While Merlot's fate is left ambiguous in the game, here's he definitely dead after Qrow murders him to prevent destruction of Mountain Glenn.
• Dramatically Missing the Point: Qrow goes to much stronger efforts to deprogram Raven from the bandits' twisted strength mentality. But instead of showing her the tribe's whole ethos is nonsense, what she consistently takes away is that the bandits themselves are much lower on the food chain than they acted, but the ethos itself is fine. In Chapter 29, Raven has shown signs of partially growing out of this mentality after five years of living among civilized society.
• Dramatic Irony:
  • Having gone back in time before he ever met Hazel in the original timeline, Qrow has no idea that the muscular younger kid he meets at the gym in the past and whose sister he befriends became one of Salem's inner-circle in Qrow's original life.
  • Qrow went back in time before ever meeting Maria in the old timeline and he's apparently never heard of her beforehand, which means that no-one but the reader knows that Qrow's intervention in killing Tock spared Maria from being blinded and losing her Silver Eyes' power.
• Embarrassing First Name: Peach prefer to be called by her surname rather then by her first name "Nessa".
• Ending the Abuse: In Raven and Qrow's dark backstory of growing up in the bandit tribe, they were groomed by the tribe's then-leader Balmung, who was a far viler and more sadistic bandit than Raven ever was. Among other things, Balmung took Raven's virginity when she was just a teenager — by force. It ended in them killing Balmung without remorse, and after going back in time to his youth, Qrow neither hesitates nor regrets killing Balmung again at the first opportunity, much earlier on the timeline than in the first universe.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones:
  • Qrow and Raven's parents, Bran and Wen, were a pair of vicious and unrepentant bandits who were completely faithful to the tribe's Darwinist ethos of taking from anyone who couldn't fight them off, but before their deaths in the field, they apparently stuck together and made sure their children had a moderately decent upbringing (by bandit standards) and that other bandits wouldn't mess with them.
  • During their final fight, Lappy angrily reveals that he loved Tock, showing he is capable of caring for others despite his psychopathy. Her death is the primary motivator that caused him to break away from Salem and start targeting Qrow and those he cared about.
• Everyone Went to School Together: The young cast isn't just Team STRQ and no one else recognizable from the show or the Coeurverse. Glynda Goodwitch and Nicholas Arc are both a couple years ahead of them in the pipeline and their years at Beacon overlap with STRQ's. Willow Schnee's schooling (implicitly interrupted by turmoil in the SDC, her marriage to Jacques, and pregnancy with Winter the first time around) starts on a similar timetable and meeting Qrow convinces her to attend Beacon rather than Atlas. The same class as STRQ also includes Gretchen Rainart, starting her originally ill-fated tenure at Beacon.
• Facial Horror: Qrow detonates a bunch of stored combustibles trying to take down Lappy in Merlot's lab. It messes up both of them, but Qrow had his back to the blast while Lappy took the whole thing to the unprotected face, grotesquely melting half of it and popping one eye like a grape.
• Fairy Tale Motifs: Lappy is based on the Pied Piper. His Semblance, activated by him whistling (i.e., making music), enables him to manipulate and guide Grimm's movements much like the Piper's music. Like the Piper, he promises to help an authority figure with his problems by using his abilities to guide and "catch" the Grimm (much like the Piper did with rats), but the affair is guaranteed to end terribly for the authority figure and an entire town if the authority figure has his way due to his hubris. Lappy further references the Piper in that he subsequently displays a nasty penchant for mass kidnapping children and even massacring them after he feels wronged by someone and wants to spite them.
• Freudian Excuse: When Qrow travels back in time to the day his parents died, he realizes that this day is/was probably the day that permanently set Raven on the path to becoming who she became in the original timeline's future; not only did she lose her parents and all of her possessions in the same day, but she had to swallow her grief to take care of Qrow, which forced her to build her strength up and indoctrinated her to the tribe's philosophy. For bonus points, she and Qrow spent the first winter without their parents surviving on absolutely nothing but whatever they could scrounge from the land on the tribe's outskirts with no help beyond the bandits keeping the Grimm away — notably, Qrow finds this was so bad in the first timeline that he realizes he's completely suppressed the memories of what they went through — and Qrow suspects that Raven might have even had to trade sexual favors with the other bandits that he didn't know about to keep them alive. In the new timeline, Qrow, now in possession of a much older, stronger and more mature mind which has already experienced that once before, instead gives Raven the breather room she needs to grieve over their parents' deaths while he takes charge of keeping them both alive, hoping that it helps deter her from the issues that plagued her into adulthood and shaped her amoral future self in the first timeline.
• Friend to All Children: Raven in both timelines is a downplayed case — she is not friendly to children per se, as the noisy child she "disciplined" on her date with Taiyang can attest, but she treats children generally with a level of exemption from her "strong survive and weak die" mentality due to thinking they literally haven't gotten a fair chance yet to grow into their potential strength. Qrow recalls that Raven in the old timeline after she took over the Branwen Tribe would subtly bribe the other bandits by granting them greater shares of loot and favor if they took in other bandits' orphans instead of leaving them to starve. In the new timeline, the thought of ensuring children don't get cruelly deprived of their fair chances to grow strong by circumstances beyond their control is one of Raven's rationalizations for actively protecting "weak" civilians as a Huntress in training.
• From Camouflage to Criminal: Lappy used to be Private Lapis, an Atlesian Specialist whose Semblance allowed his superiors to safely conduct Grimm studies. After everyone in his squad died under mysterious circumstances (suspected that he caused said deaths but unable to be proven), he was discharged from the military and eventually found his way into Salem's group.
• Future Badass: It's not exactly a Bad Future yet, but Qrow comes from a point in time where things are the worst they've been in a many years and poised to potentially get worse. He was one of the main parties on the front lines of everything going to shit, because up to that point he'd become one of the most competent people in his field.
• Generation Xerox:
  • Summer is very similar to Ruby in more than just looks. From profound compassion, idealism, stubbornness and an ability to read people's feelings, to being socially-awkward and easily emotional, Ruby inherited a lot of quirks from her mother.
  • Summer and Willow do not get along well with each-other as teammates, just like their daughters in canon.
  • It also turns out that Willow during her student days wanted just as much as Weiss did to inherit the SDC while prioritizing her Huntress education ahead of it, although she's a little more self-aware of the doublethink and the reality that she really can't juggle both.
• Gone Horribly Right: Qrow tries to get himself and Raven into the Huntsman pipeline early to get a head start on training and acclimating Raven to normal society, and the easiest way for two unidentified orphans to get noticed is to enter the amateur fighting tournament circuit. He demolishes the competition and Raven places second, drawing too much attention and requiring him to fend off the same offer Ruby would eventually take to attend an academy years early, thus bypassing Summer and Taiyang and defeating the whole purpose.
• Has a Type: As ever, Raven goes for badasses with blond hair and blue eyes. During a field trip to Beacon that the twins didn't have the opportunity to go on the first time around, she's introduced to one Nicholas Arc and instantly gets butterflies. Upon meeting Taiyang, she instantly places him a step above every other boy (whom she treats with passive indifference) by reacting to and thinking about him a lot, albeit loudly and angrily.
• I Need a Freaking Drink: Despite that his child self's body is practically teetotal, Qrow still finds himself frequently yearning for a drink — and getting frustrated that the authority figures keep barring him because he's legally underage, and because of an incident at Signal where he demonstrates how much he can drink and how much he wants to.
• In Spite of a Nail:
  • The day of the Branwen twins' parents' deaths was the day all the family's possessions and resources were stolen because there were no strong adults to enforce their claim anymore, forcing the siblings into a long period of awful subsistence living on the outskirts of the tribe before they could earn their way back in. Qrow desperately tries to stop Raven from repeating the mistake of spilling the beans in public so they can secure at least some of it, but fails.
  • Invoked. No matter how drastically Qrow plans to change the course of his and his love ones' lives, he also plans to do everything in his power to keep Yang and Ruby from being Ret-Gone in the process, no matter how convoluted it will be to get Taiyang to bed Raven and then Summer without the team breaking up.
  • It's well established in the Coeurverse that the major turning point that got Raven to respect Summer as a leader was when the wholesome girl finally got fed up with Raven's insubordination and just clobbered the shit out of her. This time around, the event that causes Raven to accept Summer in her posse occurs several years early, in a compressed form and in a slightly different setting, and it's kicked off by Qrow fixating on Summer instead of by Summer being elected Raven's team leader, but it's otherwise the same thing.
• Instantly Proven Wrong: In chapter 32 Qrow swears that he'll never make Summer disappointed, which immediately cuts Summer crying in the bathroom because of his stupidity.
• It's Personal: Qrow and Lappy gain a very personal antipathy with each other due to each other's actions toward the other. On Qrow's end, he scarred the psychotic faunus' face after ruining his plans for Mt. Glenn, and also killed Tock, whom Lappy loved. On Lappy's end, he personally tracked down the orphanage that Qrow and Raven lived at, murdered everyone there, and sent the evidence to the two just to spite them. After that, the two make it their personal respective missions to kill the other.
• Jailbait Taboo: Mentally discussed by Qrow. Although he's now back in his teenaged body, he still has the mind of a middle-aged man and still perceives himself as such — thus, he's uncomfortable when his and Raven's female school peers are crushing on him, and he's completely mortified when a teenage Willow kisses him before he can realize what she's doing and stop her.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold:
  • Both the Branwen twins show this, but it’s particularly salient for Raven: with Qrow having shouldered the burdens of caring for her when their parents died (something she’d done for him in the old timeline), she grows up still brazen and crude but her maladjustments are curbed; entering Beacon, she’s still ill-tempered and fairly tactless, but has an underlying kindness and considerateness for her loved ones and friends (not that she’d openly admit it).
  • Maria Calavera's younger self in the past is unsocial, abrasive, aloof and cynical, but she's a dedicated huntress and member of Ozpin's inner-circle fighting against Salem, and she doesn't want to see any innocents who can't handle themselves get caught in the crossfire of a deadly fight.
• Klingon Promotion: Qrow fights and kills the tribe's leader and second in impromptu duels, thus making him by tribal law the new leader. The problem is that the bandits are still scummy, sadistic brutes, and won't let themselves be ordered around by a child in the long term, no matter how intimidating his display is in the moment or what their paper-thin rules say. Qrow knows full well that they're going to try for a promotion themselves the moment his guard is down, and doesn't even give them the chance, taking advantage of that brief intimidation to pack up and leave with Raven.
• Male Might, Female Finesse: Inverted in the Branwen twins. Qrow fights with graceful and precise moves to outmaneuver the enemy without even trying. Raven fights "like an Ursa mauling a child", all aggression and wild haymakers.
• The Man Behind the Man: Lappy is eventually revealed to be the one behind the Renegade Splinter Faction of the White Fang, setting up Mane Floris to take charge of the more violent and extreme members of the peaceful organization in order to cause trouble for Remnant (and especially hoping to use them to kill Qrow).
• Mental Time Travel: The story starts with an adult Qrow battling Tyrian and waking up a few decades in the past when Raven and he were children.
• Mistaken for Romance:
  • Some bad luck with ill timing and misconstrued words on Qrow's part lead to a rumor mill that he had sex with Glynda following the latter all throughout her last year of studying at Signal before she moves on to Beacon. Several years later, Glynda is still annoyed by this.
  • Gretchen and Qrow go above and beyond to defy this trope when they hang out together, as Gretchen does not want Summer and Willow to get the wrong impression and eat her alive for it.
• Mythology Gag:
  • Qrow jokingly muses to himself that he could try to derail the Fall of Beacon via Defusing the Tyke-Bomb if he can find Cinder when she's still a child before she falls under the villains' sway. This is basically exactly what Jaune did to Emerald when he was in a time-traveling Peggy Sue position of his own in one of Coeur Al'Aran's earlier fics, Relic of the Future. It also references a story idea which Coeur considered but never executed, wherein Jaune tries to do the same for Cinder, as described in the In Your Wildest Dreams Chapter 16 author's notes.
  • In chapter 46, Qrow meets a mysterious man who introduced himself as "Vincent Saint Sinclair". People who are familiar with Coeur's other works will notice the acronym in this name: VSS.
  • In Chapter 115, Ozpin recalls a Beacon student named Ms. Cummings who had to mercy-kill a civilian whose lower body had been torn apart by the Grimm while she was on a monitored field mission. This is a reference to Peter Port's nightmare of a past experience in In Your Wildest Dreams.
• No Social Skills: Raven is naturally still a product of the tribe's upbringing and makes law-abiding urban authority figures pull their hair out with her maladaptive attitude and behavior. Qrow has social skills... specifically, those of an extremely jaded middle-aged man who's come back in time with an agenda, which means he can barely interact with other kids or teenagers, and to everyone else he comes off as just as messed up as Raven but displaying it differently.
• Not Me This Time: Ozpin's inner-circle in the old timeline including Qrow believed for years that Salem was responsible for the Grimm entering Mountain Glenn and causing the city's fall. But after Qrow discovers the true cause of the Grimm's incursion in the past, that Atlesian officials smuggled captive Grimm in as specimens for Dr. Merlot, Qrow concludes that Salem had nothing to do with Mountain Glenn's fall, which references the lore in Coeur's other fics where Salem explicitly confirms she didn't have anything to do with the people whose foolishness triggered the fall. Subverted shortly thereafter when it's explicitly confirmed that Dr. Merlot is an unwitting pawn to Salem's generals whom are already planning to use him to bring Mountain Glenn down.
• Oblivious to Love: Zig-zagged. Qrow does notice girls' interest in him, but ignores it since mentally speaking he's usually twice their age and he considers dating teenagers repugnant. But despite all of that, he doesn't notice the feelings of one specific girl, to such an extent that he could give Jaune Arc a run for his money: Summer Rose, who makes it abundantly clear that she's crushing on him... but he's convinced that she'll eventually go after Taiyang, so Qrow refuses to even consider the possibility she'd ever be interested in him instead.
• Older Than She Looks: Characters in the past observe that Maria looks no older than thirty even though she's forty-two, implicitly due to the body-renewing effects of Aura and the physical fitness that comes with the huntsman/huntress lifestyle.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted. Summer's grandfather Arthur Rose has the same first name as Dr. Watts from canon.
• Paper Tiger: By the present, Qrow is acutely aware that the feared bandit tribe that would eventually become the Branwens is in reality a rabble of unpowered thugs boasting of imagined strength but helpless when pitted against anything more threatening than frightened civilians. Raven would eventually come back with her training from Beacon, take over the tribe, and build them up to be a bit more dangerous, but back in the twins' childhood they didn't even know what Aura is, or how powerful a real Huntsman could be. They don't even know how to actually fight, they just swing their weapons around menacingly to cow unarmed villagers. Even a child like Qrow, who's skilled but isn't strong enough to challenge real warriors in his young body, is able to kill both of the tribe's leaders in just a few minutes.
• Parental Abandonment:
  • In both timelines, Qrow and Raven's bandit parents Bran and Wen were killed in a raid when the twins were only ten, and the rest of the tribe subsequently threw them onto the outskirts of the camp to fend for themselves until they could "prove their strength" enough to get back in.
  • It's unclear what happened to Summer's parents, but they're not in the picture by the time she meets a young Qrow and Raven at Signal. She's in the care of her grandfather Arthur Rose, who doesn't have long to live himself and croaks not long after.
• Point of Divergence: At some point in the future, Qrow was poisoned by Tyrian in one of their battles, and his consciousness is sent back in time to his childhood.
• Promotion to Parent:
  • In the original timeline, Raven forced herself to take care of Qrow, who was the weaker and more emotional twin, after their parents died, at the price of icing down her own grief and setting the early foundations of her adult self's turn for the worse.
  • In the new timeline after Qrow goes back, he takes on this role to Raven instead, allowing her to grieve while he looks out for her and keeps them both alive. Raven eventually admits to Summer that he essentially filled the hole that their parents' deaths left.
• Raised by Grandparents: Summer's parents died when she was quite little, leaving her in the care of her surviving set of grandparents. Her grandmother has already passed several years before Qrow meets Summer leaving her elderly grandfather, Arthur Rose, as her only surviving relative; he dies of a longterm illness months after she’s befriended the Branwens.
• Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: Qrow at one point recalls that Balmung in the original timeline had sex with Raven when she was a teenager, and she wasn't willing when it happened; just one of several reasons why Qrow loathes Balmung's guts and is glad to have killed him.
• Redeeming Replacement:
  • Very downplayed with Raven in the original timeline when she took over the subsequently-renamed Branwen Tribe. Qrow notes that she was not a good person for it, but she at least ran the tribe with some dog-petting and standards; compared to the much more sadism-driven Balmung, who was leading the bandits during Qrow and Raven's childhood, and was much more sadistic than Raven at her worst.
  • Qrow also thinks that Ironwood is one relative to the government that was in charge of Atlas before him, during Qrow's teenhood. As much as Qrow dislikes Ironwood's stuffy attitude and ruthless mindset about getting things done in the old timeline, Ironwood at least never would have allowed live Grimm to be smuggled into another kingdom's densely-populated civilian city like the Atlesian officials funding Dr. Merlot hesitantly agree to doing.
• Retroactive Precognition: Downplayed in comparison to the author's previous Peggy Sue fics. Qrow comes back in time equipped with all his knowledge and desire of the future, which give him an end goal and set of loose objectives to fulfill. However, a persistent issue he runs into is that said knowledge comes with massive gaps, partly because it's only much later that he was brought in on Ozpin's conspiracy and anything that happened before never came up, and partly because he was just generally ignorant of the world and didn't care to pay attention to things until he was most of the way through Beacon. Having to navigate the Mountain Glenn disaster and Salem's operations puts him in the position of knowing absolutely zilch except 'it is poised to happen' and 'they are probably happening somewhere' respectively.
• Selective Obliviousness: It’s suggested in-story (and confirmed by Word of God) that this is why Qrow can’t see that Summer has feelings for him despite noticing other instances of the same; he’s so caught up in his preconceived idea of their relationship from his original life, that even with the signs in front of him the idea their relationship differs in this one is out of his reach.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Qrow's life basically went to shit after he graduated from Beacon. With a second chance, he wants to stop all the good things he had from falling apart while at the same time keeping the good things he has now (Yang and Ruby). Along the way, he also ends up setting his sights on finding out what caused the fall of Mountain Glenn, which is set to occur around the spring of his first year in Beacon, and stop it from happening, especially since several of his friends in the new timeline have family living in Mountain Glenn or seriously considering moving there.
• Spiritual Antithesis: To the author's earlier Peggy Sue fic, Relic of the Future. Both works feature a character traveling far back in time to when all of Team STRQ were still alive, and looking to Set Right What Once Went Wrong; actively trying to prevent future disasters from the old timeline before they happen using their future knowledge, forming friendships with all the members of STRQ including Raven, encountering unexpected challenges, friends and allies along the way, personally nurturing people who canonically became villains to instead hopefully become heroes. However, Jaune in Relic voluntarily went back in his older self's body to the time shortly after Raven had abandoned Team STRQ when they were young adults, whereas Qrow in this fic mentally time-travels into his past self's body in a time when STRQ were all children and hadn't even met each-other yet; Qrow also doesn't know what caused his time travel. Raven in Relic, though she becomes more of a straight anti-hero under Jaune's influence in the past, is still an unrepentant bandit all throughout the story, and she never fully patches things up with her ex-teammates; whereas in Wise as an Old Qrow, Qrow is actively trying to steer a much-younger and less troubled Raven away from ever abandoning their friends to rejoin the bandits in the first place. Jaune in Relic absolutely distrusted and dreaded Ozpin almost to a fault and actively worked with his own agenda apart from Ozpin despite the latter actively trying to get him onboard, whereas Qrow in this fic still sees Ozpin as a vital ally and leader, so he actively gets himself and Raven noticed by Ozpin in the past and taken under his wing.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: Lappy is a faunus follower of Salem, in addition to being an Ax-Crazy murderer. The similarities between him and Tyrian are too obvious.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Qrow recalls that he and Nicholas worked together on Huntsman missions a few times in the old timeline, but they only respected each-other and weren't friends. On Qrow's end, he considers Nicholas too serious without room for humor, and moreso he feels that Nicholas failed to teach his son to fend for himself by refusing to train him, which let Jaune turn into the blundering mess that Qrow knew him as.
• Token Evil Teammate: Downplayed. Raven in the new timeline isn't evil per se, but she's easily the most anti-heroic out of her and Qrow's social group. She's training to become a Huntress mainly because she's following Qrow's lead and because it enables her to become stronger, and implicitly also because it enables her to stick with her other friends, particularly Summer. Raven personally doesn't have as much sympathy as her better-adjusted friends do for adult civilians in society who've chosen not to get strong enough to defend themselves, but she's happy to go out of her way to save children, whom in her P.O.V. haven't gotten a fair chance to prove or develop their own strength yet at that point in their lives, of her own initiative.
• Traumatic Superpower Awakening: Raven awakens her Semblance after experiencing the traumatic sensation that her brother is about to die. This allows her to open a portal to where Qrow is, allowing her to rescue him from Lappy at the last second.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: Raven approaches all social interaction as a dominance hierarchy. Qrow has issues socializing with anyone who isn't a veteran huntsman or huntress decades older than him, and he's also been drinking heavily since he was 14... though the people troubled by this don't know the whole story, and don't realize that he looks like an example but isn't.
• Unwitting Pawn: Dr. Merlot's research in Mountain Glenn involves, among other things, seeing whether the pacifying effect of Apathy Grimm have any effect on other Grimm's behavior. His tests suggest that they do, with other captured Grimm becoming docile, but this is a trick. The smuggled Grimm are being supplied by an agent of Salem and commanded to act passive by her influence. In the original timeline, this sealed the fall of Mountain Glenn by unleashing a swarm of supposedly-pacified Grimm in the middle of the city at the same time another swarm is attacking from the outside. Qrow, connecting the dots while infiltrating Merlot's lab, destroys the test subjects and assassinates Merlot to stop his ill-advised actions from dooming Mountain Glenn.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid:
  • Okay, not really. But Qrow muses that Raven's attempts to keep up the image of strength and brutality just come off as cute and endearing when she's a little girl who can't back it up, as opposed to an extremely dangerous adult who can and does.
  • Qrow doesn't know how to connect the future Willow Schnee, who by reputation grew up to be a passive business figurehead and in private wound up a depressed alcoholic wreck, with the Huntress-in-training teenager he meets in the past, who makes him think of a more sophisticated Yang.
• Viler New Villain: Salem's generals in STRQ's generation follow a similar pattern to her generals from Team RWBY's generation in the original timeline, but the two generals that have received significant characterization are both notably more heinous than their respective counterparts from Team RWBY's generation in the old timeline were:^note They're "new" from the reader's and a time-traveling Qrow's non-linear perspective, but chronologically speaking In-Universe, these guys came before the "old" villains.
  • Lappy is basically the Tyrian of STRQ's generation as a demented, dual blade-wielding, psychopathic Faunus, but he pointedly has none of the standards nor redeeming qualities that Tyrian is usually written with throughout Coeur Al'Aran's other fics, such as Tyrian's affinity for children or his unconditional loyalty to Salem.
  • Alvarian is Salem's equivalent to Hazel in STRQ's generation as a cold, unemotional and respectful pragmatist who tries to be a noble demon, but is nevertheless ruthless and has a habit of shifting blame for her own crimes and their consequences. However, unlike Hazel, who shows no signs of being prejudiced against any groups nor that he commited any crimes before coming into Salem's service; Alvarian is a human supremacist who fought on the humans' side during the Faunus Revolution and burned Faunus prisoners including children to death on her superior's orders, all before she fell into Salem's fold.
• Weak, but Skilled: After a little bit to get used to his smaller size and adjust his muscle memory, Qrow ends up by far the most dangerous member of the tribe, even though he's an Aura-less preteen and the rest are big experienced adults. Not only is he the only member who knows how to fight period rather than just push around civilians, but he's one of the best in the world at it to boot. He can, and does, easily kill any of the bandits one-on-one, though he's fully aware they could gang up on him just as easily.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Qrow recalls that just after the canon incident in Ruby and Yang's childhood, where Yang went looking for Raven and they almost got killed by Grimm, the first thing Qrow did after saving them and taking them home was to literally knock some sense into Taiyang for neglecting them to the point where that incident was able to happen in the first place, until Tai finally summoned some willpower to fight back and start emerging from his post-Summer BSoD. Qrow's POV also states that if he'd gotten the chance before he went back in time, he would've had some choice words for Blake about her running away and abandoning her team partner at the end of Volume 3, especially since it personally reminded Qrow too much of the original timeline's Raven doing the same thing to Yang and Tai.
• Would Hurt a Child: Lappy is perfectly willing to slaughter an entire orphanage of children just to mess with Qrow after the latter ruined his assignment and melted his face.