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itsclydebitches · 3 years

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re: that ask you posted a couple days ago about the male and female representation in RWBY, part of what makes RWBY's whole 'girl power' thing ring exceptionally hollow to me is the fact that there are like... no women in positions of real power in remnant. like at all. except the big bad.

winter is second in command to james. glynda is second in command to ozpin. all of the headmasters are men (for no discernible reason, imo; why theodore and not dorothea?). the leader of the ace ops was a white man (and then winter seemed to take over clover's position instead of either of the women of color on the team, and she was still second to james). RWBY is an all girl team, but JNPR was led by a boy despite a girl arguably being far more qualified (pyrrha). the happy huntresses are all women, and robyn had no real power to speak of--she didn't even manage to win the election, because jacques rigged it, and then the council ceased to matter. there was one (1) woman on the council, but she was so inconsequential that i can't even remember her name. (i suppose we're lucky it was the guy and not her who james shot lol) jacques controls the SDC instead of willow, even though he's not even a schnee by blood and actually married into the family for power. (and we don't even know how he got it over his wife.)

and then there's the white fang, which ghira led and not kali--and it's ghira who leads menagerie itself, while kali seems to be a housewife. sienna had five minutes of screentime before being brutally killed and her position assumed by adam, a man. cordovin is basically a one off lackey we haven't even thought about before or since. neo was second to roman. you have cinder, sure, who is a second but to salem, a woman, and raven as the leader of the branwen tribe--but what does it really say about your 'girl power' narrative when the only women with genuine systemic power in your world are villains or antagonists with massive bodycounts??

atla has the same sort of problem--a couple great female characters, but all the leadership positions are men (except the kyoshi warriors, an all girls group, and even then the leader of their island is an old man) and the one female mentor figure also turns out to be evil--but it at least has some great writing to help overlook that fact, and it came out in the mid-00's and so has some sort of excuse of being a product of its time. but rwby didn't even start until 2013 and it's still going and still making these kinds of decisions well into 2021.

where is this supposed girl power, exactly? am i really supposed to overlook the very patriarchal worldbuilding just because the title characters are girls?

That's an excellent summary of the situation, anon, and as with so much in RWBY, it comes down to the full context. Any one of these examples isn't necessarily going to mean much on its own. It's when you look at the pattern that you can start making a case for those conclusions: Why is the show marketed on "girl power" set in a world where men hold the vast majority of that power? And, more importantly, why is that setup not the point? We could easily have a story where that lopsided gender dynamic is the problem that the girls are looking to fix, but... that story doesn't exist. Like the problems discussed with Jaune, the supposed point here exists only on the surface. Dig just the tinniest bit — the above — and you hit on a lot of structural problems with this "girl power" world.

To add just a few details to what you've already said:

Salem indeed has power, but she's never allowed to fully use it. Each volume the frustration with this grows as Salem accumulates more abilities and then just sits on them. From literally hiding out for a thousand years to worries that she won't use the Staff in Volumes 9-10, Salem really isn't allowed to be the threat she's presented as on the surface. And yes, this is absolutely due in part to the "She's too OP and the writers don't know how to let her be that powerful while still having the heroes win" issue, but again, context. That problem doesn't exclude others occurring simultaneously.

Same double explanation with Summer. Yes, dead moms are an incredibly common trauma to dump on a protagonist, but it still left Yang and Ruby with Tai as their primary influence. And Qrow. The uncle becomes the extended family influence while Raven is the absent one/eventual antagonist. It's personal power as opposed to political power, but Tai, Qrow, Ozpin, formerly James... most of the mentors are men. Maria, a key exception, has been ignored in that regard. The story announced that she was Qrow's inspiration, setup her being Ruby's new mentor, and then... nothing. Nothing has come of that. She disappeared for a volume and then went off to Amity and was literally forgotten by the story when evacuating everyone was the finale's whole point.

Like that Endgame moment I mentioned, the Happy Huntresses feel a little too forced to me. Yes, it's the same basic idea as in ATLA, but ATLA, as you say, has a lot more going for it. The Happy Huntresses feel... on the nose? Idk exactly how to explain it. Like, "Here they are! Another team of all women! Isn't this how progressive storytelling works? Just ignore how this is a one-off team of minor characters compared to the world building issues discussed above." And if you're not paying attention, you miss just how insignificant they are, with a side of Robyn being, well, Robyn. The Kyoshi Warriors, at least, are based off of Kyoshi. A woman avatar who is a significant part of their history. That is, presumably, why they're an all women warrior group (but who notably still teach Sokka). The Happy Huntresses are all huntresses because...? There's no reason except that meta "We want to look progressive" explanation. Just like having all the women superheroes team up for a hot second so people get excited and ignore the representation problems across, what? 21 films? Don't get me wrong, I love that May is among the Happy Huntresses. I think including her in the explicitly all-women group was one of the better things RWBY has done in a long time, but the rest is still a mess.

RWBY is arguably about these smaller groups as opposed to systematic power (despite the writers trying to work that in with things like the White Fang and the election. Not to mention the implication that everything in Atlas is fine now that evil Ironwood has died and taken the symbol of wealth (the city) with him. We saw a human holding hands with a faunus after all. Racism and corruption solved, I guess.) So yes, our group is dominated by women... but Whitley is the one saving Nora, helping to defeat the Hound (plus Willow), thinking of the airships, and providing the blueprints they need to escape. Salem is our Big Bad, except Ironwood is the one the volume focuses on. Ruby is our leader, but Jaune is the one leading the group into the whale and getting praised for how heroic he is. Ren does more to shake things up, even if he's painted as the one in the wrong. Oscar gets to confront Salem and destroys the whale threat. Ozpin provides the information they need to evacuate. Meanwhile, when the girls do things in Volume 8 it's almost always followed by a long-stint of passiveness. Nora opens the door so she can be unconscious for most of the volume. Penny keeps Amity up so she can also be unconscious for a good chunk of time. Ruby sends her message and then sits in a mansion. Blake fights so she can tearfully beg Ruby to save her. Weiss, as said, takes a backseat to Whitley (and Klein). They forward the plot, absolutely, but comparatively it doesn't feel like enough.

It's that pattern then, no one specific example. More and more the personal power, not just the systematic power already built into Remnant, seems to be coming from the men. Not all the time, but enough that scenes like the tea drinking moment feel like a part of a much larger problem. Pietro taking control, Watts hacking, and Ambrosius literally remaking her when Penny is supposed to already be in control of herself and her fate. Winter being presented as the active mentor to Weiss, only to turn around and claim that Ironwood was actually responsible for everything. Ruby, Weiss, Blake, and May straight up commenting on how awful things are out there while Yang, Jaune, Ren, and Oscar lead the charge against Salem — with the latter three doing the most to forward that mission (no fear, semblance, cane). As others have only half-joked, Yang's supposedly badass moment was bringing up a mother she's ignored for six volumes and briefly blowing up the immortal woman for a couple of seconds (with Ironwood's bombs). Even Marrow is arguably the most significant Ace Op after Clover. Vine isn't actually a character, Elm slightly less so, Harriet is there to go crazy and try to drop a bomb (notably before admitting to never-before-existed feelings for Clover), but Marrow? He's the one who breaks out. Who is meant to heroically stand up against Ironwood. Who comments on how awful it is that teenagers are fighting and, regardless of how messed up the moral messages are, is supposedly pushing for active change while all the women in his group, including Winter, insist on maintaining the status quo. Look at all these choices as a whole, it makes throwaway worldbuilding choices like "All the Maidens are women" feel pretty hollow. Why does it matter if Amber is a Maiden if she dies in a flashback so Ozpin can struggle to pass on the power? If Pyrrha dies before becoming one so Jaune can angst about it? If Raven is one and then disappears from the story entirely? If Winter has enough power to break Ironwood's aura, but supposedly had no power throughout every other choice she made getting here? If Penny is one, but is continually controlled by men and then asks another man to help her die? It's just really unconvincing, once you look past the surface excitement of a woman looking cool with magic powers.

When you do consider the whole of the story — both in terms of our world building and who is forwarding the plot in the latter volumes, getting the emotional focus, being proactive, etc. — there are a lot of problems that undermine the presumed message RT wants to write. They say, "girl power" by marketing RWBY with these four women, but too many of the storytelling decisions thoroughly undermine that, revealing what's likely a deeply ingrained, subconscious bias.

#rwde #rwby #mymetas

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grifalinas · 3 years

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So I spent all day at work thinking about ways to adapt the Royals au as an original work so have some thoughts!

Also for now I'm not going to worry about changing names very much, that can come later, so for now I'll just call things their R*BY names. Anywho.

-Roman will need to be introduced much earlier, not just for nepotism reasons but also for nepotism reasons. He ended up integral to the plot in the last third, but he also came out of nowhere and I feel like I can flesh him out more, as well as flesh out the antagonist group more.

-I'm also introducing Jackdaw earlier, though I'm leaving Jay and the Merla reveal for later. Jackdaw being there will help me flesh out Qrow's side of the story, as well as some of the more political elements.

-I really need to do a better job of establishing James' character. In a fanfic it was easy to take James' characterization for granted- we knew that James was a good man who cared about his people and shouldered too many burdens in canon, so we took it for granted that he was in the au as well. In an original work, it's not enough for me to have Qrow just say James is a good man, I need to actually show it. Otherwise I fall into the same bad writing traps cRWBY are.

-I'm going to shove an extra week in between James and Qrow doinking after the welcome feast and James' first injury. I think this will give me the space to do a lot of that character establishment that I need to do with all of the characters, will give me space to establish the antagonists and behind the scenes stuff before everything goes to hell, and also will give me a chance to include the plotline that I originally wrote that fic to use, where Tai and James start flirting round the idea of a match and Qrow loses it.

-"Fine! Just go and get married then! I'm sure you'll be very happy together! And at the wedding, you can cut the cake with this knife in my back!"

-After that Tai backs off because he didn't realize Qrow had feelings for James, he just thought they were messing around. Also, around this time is when Raven sends Summer to keep Tai busy so he doesn't go getting engaged before she has a chance to come back (she also intends for them to fall in love, and when she reveals this to James in the epilogue and he asks her how she knew they would, she just smiles this really dopey smile and says, "How could they not?"). So the James/Tai plot fizzles at this point, but it ACTUALLY GETS A CHANCE TO HAPPEN.

-I'm going to very slowly introduce Yang and Junior into the plot through Summer, having cryptic scenes around her visiting Yang and giving us a little bit more at a time, but Yang being Raven's daughter is the big twist when it finally is revealed. The story doesn't do a lot of hiding details- characters find out things that the audience knows all along several times- but the twist of Raven leaving because she was pregnant and James' heir being Winter regardless are both things that are kept close to my chest. I think apart from those, the only other thing that is really a twist is when we find out that Roman is Jay's illegitimate son, something I also need to do a better job with, since it kind of came out of nowhere at the end there.

-I think one of the ways that I establish James' character better is going to be having him have calls with Winter. Because it's cute.

-I'm going James and Jacques are brothers for this. It's a way of playing with their characters that I always have a lot of fun with, and it also makes things neater in general- Jacques' daughter inherits the Ironwood titles because James can't have biological children and Jacques is the second Ironwood son, hence his family's titles going to his eldest. I might also make them half brothers; there's some elements of the worldbuild that would feed into having that explain his bitterness (but not excuse his actions) and explain why he married Willow and took over her rightful title.

-The magic system is getting a huge overhaul, but I'm going to talk about that and the Branwen magic lore in another post. I think changing it up so that magic is a learnable skill, but not everyone bothers to, will make things easier on my plot than if everyone has one special superpower that they learn as they level up. This will make the Branwens' and Summer's and Glynda's magic more special, and James being a cyborg will balance that somewhat. Tai, by contrast, won't have any magical abilities at all, and this will run parallel to him also not using a weapon and preferring to be a brawler- who needs weapons or magic when you've got sick guns?

-Tai finally gets to be the bear he is in my heart and also my aus.

-Glynda still fights in heels, but this is repeatedly stressed as something impressive that she learned to do, and she is very much an outlier who shouldn't be counted. (Summer and Raven, by contrast, do not fight in heels.)

-I put a lot of thought into it, and I'm keeping cyborg James and scythe + bird shenanigans Qrow. I've gone back and forth over it pretty much since finishing Royals, and all of these things were relevant enough and integral to the story that changing them would require me to start huge parts of the story over from zero, and that's way more work than I want to put in. RT don't own cyborgs, bird transformations, or rule of cool scythes, and I've thought of ways to integrate these elements into the plot and approach them uniquely enough that even if RT does look at my work and are like "hey, that's ours!", it'll just be a matter of "yeah, and?" rather than any question of legality.

-I think along with calls to Winter I'll also have James make calls to his mother. I love her characterization and again, it'll give me a good chance to do some establishing work with his character.

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a-mellowtea · 5 years

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RWBY Issue #1: An Elegy For Continuity

I’ve never been one for comic books. I think I read a couple when I was younger. I seem to recall Spiderman. I did pick up the Bone series at one point and fell in love with it. But beyond that, they never appealed to me. Now that I’m older, however, and finding more of an appreciation for design and storytelling alike, I really want to go back and just smother younger me in superhero and fantasy comics to make up for what I missed.

When I heard that RWBY was making a venture into the comics scene thanks to DC, I honestly got excited. It’s a perfect medium to tell stories that canon may not have been able to cover, and with the promised content being set in the area in-universe -- between Volumes 3 and 4 -- we have the least specific information about, there was no conceivable reason not to be at least interested.

RWBY #1 dropped on August 28th, 2019 under the subtitle “Prelude: The Elegy”. It’s narrated by Ruby Rose, one of the series’ titular characters and arguable ‘main’ protagonist out of the four, and covers in very brief form the Creatures of Grimm, the Huntsmen Academies, the fellow members -- Yang Xiao Long, Blake Belladonna and Weiss Schnee -- of RWBY, the Color Naming Convention/Rule, Dust, Semblances and the Fall of Beacon. It ends with the finale of Volume 3, and Ruby uncertain if they’ll be able to carry on.

The quality of the artwork and layout varies, but overall Mirka Andolfo and Arif Prianto do capture the look and feel of the characters (although, they can’t seem to decide whether Weiss is left-handed or not). Whether or not some of it seems off is an entirely subjective matter. Personally, while I find some panels to be absolutely striking (such as Tai, Yang and Ruby at Summer’s grave, the Volume 1-3 era combat panels, the initial Battle of Beacon Academy page, and the final panel), I also find others to be a bit... lacking (the Volume 4 design splash page especially).

An article by CBR appropriately labeled it an adaptation at a “breakneck pace”, which is honestly an understatement. The elements I mentioned get perhaps a page each, touched on in a manner I can in all seriousness relate to skipping a stone across a pond. Being a fan of the series, for me, that is perfectly fine; I already have as much of a grasp on things like Aura and Dust and the combat Academies as one who has been with the show since the Volume 2/3 hiatus could. On top of that, with Ruby as our narrator and speaking from in-universe, she may not see the need to go into incredible detail. However, someone just delving into RWBY with this as a primer or part of their proper introduction to Volumes 1 or 2 would in all likelihood be left winded by everything that zooms by with so little explanation. These elements are essential to the story and the world of Remnant. They, along with certain key events such as the Battle of Beacon, are the building blocks of the series.

On that front, it certainly doesn’t help anything that canon is shakily incorporated or, at points, firmly and summarily disregarded. See, the issue with RWBY #1 doesn’t lie in the art style or storytelling. Rather, it is with the connective tissue between the comic and its source material.

Most of these instances aren’t egregious oversights but are worth mentioning regardless. For instance, there is a panel in which Penny is shown wearing Beacon’s uniform, though she is from Atlas and was never shown wearing any of the Academy’s uniforms.

In the panel talking about Semblances, Weiss’ Semblance is described as being able to “summon any Grimm she’s slain”. While true, that is a facet of her Semblance, not her power itself. Weiss’ Semblance is Glyphs. She also never summoned before the Battle of Beacon, making the page of her summoning a Grimm circa that time also inaccurate.

In yet another, Ruby mentions rumors about the Maidens and magic. However, the only way she could have known about the Four Maidens before Qrow telling her and RNJR in Volume 4 Chapter 8 was through the fairy tale known as the “Story of the Seasons”. Only the Ozluminati (Ozpin, Qrow, Glynda and James) and Pyrrha knew in full about the truth surrounding the four Maidens. As this is being narrated at the end of Volume 3 (the “now”, as stated in the penultimate panel), Jaune also only knew that Cinder had acquired some sort of power; nothing of magic or the Maidens.

The worst of these errors come at the end of the comic, and are most plainly wrong. Ruby is shown having come back to Patch on foot, whereas she was most certainly entirely unconscious when she was brought back to Patch by Qrow. It is also implied that Ruby returned to help Tai take care of Yang; their conditions of consciousness somewhat perplexingly reversed from canon.

Furthermore, though it is clearly stated and shown that Jacques was the one to take Weiss home after the events at Beacon, Willow also appears to be present alongside an AK-200.*

And finally, Taiyang is shown in the aforementioned penultimate panel waving goodbye to RNJR as they depart for Mistral. The issues of this particular change are further-reaching than most of the others; Ruby leaving without a word to her father and sister other than a letter was brought up several times in Volume 4, and was part of what made Yang and Ruby’s reunion in Volume 5 such a good moment.

Some things are also oddly worded (and that’s without mentioning the run-on sentences), leading to unnecessary confusion. For example, at one point, Ruby explains that “Atlas, Vale, Vacuo and Mistral -- every Kingdom in Remnant has their own way of dealing with Grimm. But only the Kingdom of Vale has Beacon, the legendary Academy where my mother and father went to become Huntsmen”. This makes it sound like Beacon is the only Huntsmen Academy in Remnant, and the other Kingdoms have completely separate ways of dealing with the Grimm. I doubt that was the authorial intent; it could be explained away rather easily as Ruby simply stating that none of the other Academies are as good; ie, there is only one Beacon.

There is also another rather odd panel following the aforementioned, in which a young Ruby and Yang stand with Taiyang, their father, and Summer Rose, Ruby’s biological mother. While this family shot is very nice and certainly pulls on a fan’s heartstrings, the composition is strange. If this is meant to be an in-canon moment, rather than a symbolic one, then Ruby and Yang’s ages at the time of Summer’s death are thrown into question yet again. As stated by Yang in Volume 5 Chapter 8, “My mom left me. Ruby’s mom left too. Dad was always busy with school, and Ruby couldn’t even talk yet”. This shot, with Ruby and Yang looking closer to 6 and 8 respectively, contradicts that.

That’s not to say that these errors, numerous as they are, completely ruin the experience of reading the comic. Paired with Mirka Andolfo’s artwork, RWBY #1 presents a decent introduction to RWBY until the end of Volume 3, heading into the timeskip territory. However, being a recap of elements and events already covered in the show, it is sorely lacking and has absolutely no excuse to be. I saw someone mention that it feels like the writer, Marguerite Bennett, skimmed the show’s Wiki or otherwise did the least amount of research possible on the series before writing. I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment.

At the end of the day, RWBY #1 “Prologue: The Elegy” is a good attempt at summarizing the most basic and key material of Volumes 1-3, but ultimately fails, falls flat and devolves into a mess of inconsistencies, errors and nonsensical changes that fans should not consider being canon whether it has been stated to be in the category of “canon-until-it’s-not” or not.

I do hope they find their footing in the second issue of RWBY, as perhaps original content will provide better space for the story to flow largely unhindered by canonical information.

*Amendment: I originally stated that it was Winter in this panel. I’ve been since informed that that is incorrect. Apologies for the mistake!

#rwby #rwby dc #dc comics #rwby the elegy #it's not... bad bad #but it's... still kinda bad #all of this honestly just gave me a headache #i was thoroughly disappointed

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