I think Rooster Teeth had good reasons to leave Winter Schnee, her mother, and her grandmother out of Volume 4. For Weiss, Volume 4 was a struggle with the male side of her family, so that is what her episodes and the “WOR: Schnee Dust Company” episode covered.

The company was started by her grandfather, Nicholas Schnee. Based on the fact that his work took him away from his family, and that he looked to someone outside of the family to inherit the business, neither his wife or daughter were involved in running or building it. Jacques Schnee took up the responsibility.

Weiss was the current heir to the company. She despises her father, and opposed him by trying to be like her grandfather, with the goal of returning the family reputation to what it had been under Nicholas Schnee. But since her father held all of the cards and recent events had made Weiss irrational in her rebellion, she utterly failed and lost her inheritance to Whitley, her younger brother who took after their father.

Ironically, this freed her, and I think she began to focus more on the female side of her family. This is when she resumes her practice at Summoning, reaffirms her pride in being a huntress by choice, and escapes to reunite with Winter.

Volume 5 promises to be very busy and to take place entirely in or around Mistral City. I don’t expect the story to truly return to Atlas until Volume 6, at least, but that is when I predict the Schnee women will get their focus.

After all, Weiss and Winter didn’t get their hereditary Semblance from Jacques Gelee. They got it from Willow Schnee, and Mommy might not be happy with what her daughters do in Volume 5. Or else she might finally take a stand with them against her husband. Either way, I suspect she’s going to show us what Schnee Glyphs can really do.

This will likely be accompanied by some kind of explanation, or at least a hint, about why the Schnee Semblance is hereditary and so powerful. Possibly also a World of Remnant episode about Grandma Schnee.

I believe that Grandma Schnee was the descendant of Mantlese nobility (or even royalty), and that the Schnee Glyph/Emblem we saw on the factories in Old Vacuo (in “WOR: Vacuo”) used to belong to a titled family that lost their titles after the Great War, and who were looking for a new reputation and source of income now that Mantle was becoming Atlas. Old Families marrying New Money is an old story.

There’s also the fact that when Qrow first mentions Nicholas Schnee in WOR:SDC, he reveals Remnant’s symbol for their Lien currency, in the color brown. Nicholas himself is presented in the same shade of brown, whereas his daughter Willow is presented in the modern Schnee white, which she might have inherited from his wife, her mother. The Lien symbol might have been Nicholas’ own personal emblem.

Nick is never directly represented with the white snowflake emblem; only his company is, and then only after a few years since he discovered Solitas’ new Dust mine. A few years is more than enough time for him to marry Grandma Schnee and then adopt her renamed emblem as the marker of the Schnee family and company.

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Nick’s daughter was set to inherit his business, the same way that he inherited his father’s humble estate, and the same way that Weiss is the official heiress of the Schnee Dust Company despite having a hardly-younger brother.

But owning a thing and managing a thing are two different beasts entirely.

There are two simple answers for why Nick’s daughter doesn’t control the SDC: Either Nick passed her over in favor of Jacques Gelee in spite of her wishes, or Nick’s daughter never actually wanted to run the family business.

The WoR didn’t tell us how Nick’s daughter felt about Jacques becoming the new manager of the family business. But assuming that she had wanted the responsibility for herself, it stands to reason that she would have been a business-woman with an official position within the company, just as we can safely presume that Jacques was one of Nick’s employees.

After Nick handed over the reigns, Jacques Schnee made the Schnee Dust Company more powerful than ever, and he took an active (if toxic) interest in his children’s lives. On the other hand, Nick’s daughter has quite possibly become an alcoholic with very little apparent involvement in her children’s lives. Which of these two seems to have been more invested in taking over the company?

If you assume that Nick’s daughter had been an employee in the company and had wanted to manage it herself, then her current state suggests that she utterly gave up in the face of hardship, rather than struggle to achieve as much control as possible. I doubt that even Jacques could have fired the daughter of the company’s founder and gotten away with it.

Alternatively, you can assume that Nick’s daughter wasn’t an employee and didn’t care if someone else controlled the company, even if she currently regrets those decisions very much now that she has effectively no legal power to fix the problem.

It’s very good to assert that a daughter should be able to take over her father’s business, because strict gender divisions in the labor force are bullshit. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that every daughter should want to take over her father’s business. A daughter can legitimately want to do something else with her life. Didn’t Winter join the military against her father’s wishes and seemingly get replaced as heiress by Weiss?

Given that Jacques couldn’t have the hereditary Semblance, perhaps Winter learned its secrets from his wife, her mother, Nick’s daughter, who might have been a huntress or specialist herself.

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The modern Schnee family emblem is the distinctive snowflake which is reflected in their hereditary Semblance. The emblem and Semblance are white; yet, Nicholas Schnee was very brown and also red. Jolly Old Nick was also a tall and broad-shouldered man, while his white-themed daughter was much shorter and slender.

I think it is possible that big and brown Nicholas married a willowy and white woman who was the actual source of the modern Schnee hereditary Semblance. Their daughter, Willow Schnee, was the first white Schnee with the hereditary Semblance. Then Jacques Julliet married into the family and adopted the name, and the modern three white Schnees were born.

If the snowflake emblem existed before Nicholas, as World of Remnant: Vacuo seems to suggest, then Nicholas might have married a noblewoman of a special lineage, and he adopted her emblem for his company even as she adopted his name.

Alternatively, the emblem did not exist before the Great War, and WoR: Vacuo was showing us a modern Schnee mining town in the south-eastern side of Vacuo’s desert.

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I think Jacques’ decision shocked Whitley as much as it did Weiss. Look at his expression after Jacques opens the door; it’s the first time we see Whitley completely off-guard. It actually takes him a moment to get his mask back on.

Before that day, Jacques had no reason to strip Weiss of her title. Her popularity as a singer and her sympathetic status as a survivor of Beacon combined nicely with her highly-visible position as the heir. How could Whitley have known about plans that Jacques would have no cause to even consider? Also, if Jacques had planned to do it after the disaster, it still would have been too late for any warning from Whitley to do Weiss any good, assuming that he even had the chance to warn her.

Additionally, Whitley did nothing to provoke Weiss to explode or rebel, and we never saw him do anything to persuade his father to be harsher with Weiss. If anything, we saw Whitley try to prepare Weiss to deal with their father’s unreasonableness with a clear head, when he warned her of Jacques’ foul mood in Chapter 2.

When Weiss tries to blame Whitley for the consequences of her own actions, he finally loses his temper with her. He very correctly points out that trying to defy Jacques was a stupid thing to do, precisely because their father holds all of the power.

Whitley has grown up watching his sisters receive nothing but hardship for rebelling against their father. I believe in the theory that Whitley decided that he was going to survive by toeing the line; obeying his father just enough to make Jacques feel that he could ignore Whitley as a reliable drone.

But Weiss has now put Whitley in the hot seat. Now suddenly his father and the rest of the world are going to be demanding things of him as The Heir. He’s going to face new responsibilities and pressures and levels of scrutiny, and his old strategy for surviving until Jacques dies of old age may no longer work for him anymore.

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