| “ | I'm combat ready! | „ |
| ~ Penny |
Penny is a character in RWBY who was introduced in the episode The Stray, when she was found lying on the ground after Weiss crashed into her, chasing after Sun Wukong. She later reappears and aids Blake, Sun, and Ruby in defeating Roman Torchwick and the White Fang, by destroying their ships carrying stolen dust cargo.
Appearance
Penny has short, rather curly, orange hair that comes down to her chin, with a pink bow in the back of her head, emerald green eyes, light skin and freckles. She wears an old-fashioned blouse with short feminine overalls, as well as a black and green collar with a matching pair of stockings. The green lines on the side of her pants also appear to glow at times.
Personality
Penny speaks robotically, behaves erratically, and is overly active in general. All her actions and emotional states are somehow extreme and overacted. She seemed both immensely pleased and somewhat surprised by Ruby's unconditional offer of friendship. When Ruby got attacked by Roman and knocking Ruby to the ground, this action caused Penny to be angered, showing that she values Ruby's friendship. She also seems to be immensely curious, as she asked Ruby numerous questions during their walk, all being related to Blake and friendship.
Powers and Abilities
As seen in Black and White, Penny is able to control numerous swords, kept in what appears to be a small mechanical backpack, with simple movements from her hands. She is able to manipulate every sword simultaneously without any difficulty at all, and can fire energy blasts when she brings them together, with the swords going into a special blaster-like configuration. This blast of energy is powerful enough to destroy multiple airships at a time by slicing them in half. She can also use thin strings attached to the hilts of her swords to anchor herself or pull down an airship, despite the mass and thrust power of the vehicle which seems to indicate enhanced strength as well as the ability to anchor herself in some other way than her weapons' grappling mode. The swords are able to fold in half lengthwise for easier storage. Her controlled movement of her swords is possibly linked to magnetism, telekinesis, or could be a unique effect of the weapons themselves. Penny's 'strings' seems to be quite strong and durable, as they were able to pull down an airjet easily.
Penny is also able to jump a great distance, with the force of her jump being enough to break the ground. This may indicate that she is abnormally heavy for her size. Also, Penny seems to have a high amount of speed, such as appearing from one spot to another, like appearing in front of Team RWBY out of the blue, after they left. She also inexplicably appears in front of Weiss, Yang and Ruby two days later.
Trivia
- Penny will be participating in the upcoming Vytal Festival tournament.
- Her name might be a reference to Pinocchio.
- In her debut episode, when Ruby Rose tells Penny that she is her friend, Penny exclaims, "We can paint our nails, and try on clothes, and talk about cute boys!", which is a callback to Weiss Schnee's sarcastic rebuttal of Ruby's friendship in The Shining Beacon, Pt.2.
- She noticed that Blake is a Faunus while most of Team RWBY (as well as others) didn't.
- Penny bears several similarities to the Murakumo Units from the Blazblue fighting game series. Like Penny, the Murakumo Units are female artificial humans who fight using multiple telekinetically controlled swords which bear a striking resemblance to Penny's weapons. The Murakumo Units also have robotic speech patterns, albeit much more robotic and emotionless than Penny's.
- The way Penny wields her weapon is similar to Naminé from Dead Fantasy, another project that Monty Oum worked on. Her fighting style is also very similar Naminé's from which Monty took from Nu-13 of BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger (the only BlazBlue game Monty ever played).
- Coincidentally, Penny has a few elements to the old TV cartoon show, Inspector Gadget.
- Penny shares the same name as one of the protagonists in the show.
- Penny has bionic parts built inside her body like Inspector Gadget.
- The last scene shows her leaving with an unseen man in a vehicle, which is similar to the antagonist, Dr. Claw, though we have yet to know if the unseen man is a friend or foe.
- Her hair color and potential allusion to Pinocchio have led some to speculate a relation to Roman Torchwick, who draws inspiration from Pinocchio's best friend, Candlewick. Though there is some doubt now that she has fought Roman.
- In RWBY Volume 3 Episode 9: PVP, Penny dies in the singles rounds when she was fighting Pyrrha Nikos as Emerald makes the illusion to Pyrrha that Penny is using at least one hundred of her swords (she only has a few, not close enough to what the illusion insists) causing Pyrrha to use her semblance to propel what she is seeing backwards, causing Penny to copy Pyrrha's stance (considering she is a robot and the metal Penny is made of is being affected) and the wires from her swords wrapped around her left arm and torso, causing her to be cut in half. This is probably the first death within the episodes that we can view/witnesses and is not told to us like Summer Rose's death was told to us.