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inflammatoryfandomblog · 3 years

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pre-note: i’m going to tag @darkchocolatekitkat here, but at the same time this isn’t really a response per say, in that i don’t really want to be argumentative or whatever (this is literally just my style of typing/speaking generally, i realize i can come off as hostile) or clog up their mentions. so i figure mentioning them is a compromise between acknowledging their post without coming off as rude. this is basically a post prompted by some of their previous posts but with an entirely different point, so it sits in a fairly gray area. anyways!

listen man, i loved volume 7 james ironwood. i think up until volume 8, james ironwood slowly had more facets of his character revealed, and i was almost excited for where his character could go from there.

because ironwood was a decent person in a position of corrupt power (an unelected position with two seats on the council lmao, that’s fishy as hell), and you can’t really stick to being a decent person in that institutional position for long. he tries his best. he also had a tragic flaw, and that was being self-sacrificing in a way that was almost insistent on him being a hero. the whole “i love you, and that’s why i must do THIS for you, and i know THIS is good because it requires me sacrificing something, so you should be grateful.” thing

kind of like that dad who keeps toiling away at giving you that baked casserole that you don’t really want, because you are his child, and so he puts in that work out of parental love, yes, but also out of a need to be your provider. when you don’t want the casserole, a resentment builds up. this sort of thing is subtle, but it’s believable, it happens in real life, and it’s actually a really complex sort of flaw. kind of like a sense of paternalism that’s also tied to ironwood’s good qualities.

but instead of understanding... any of that, crwby literally goes for the lazy “oh NO IRONWOOD is LOSING his HUMANITY!!!! look!!!! he has a prosthetic arm and that means he is less human!!! look at our visual metaphors! aren’t we clever! and, uh, yeah, i’m not gonna touch that with a 10-foot pole because yikes, i don’t really bring up representation often but maybe don’t do that.

(if you want to know why this is not great, for the uninitiated, saying that prosthetic limbs make you less human is... hmm. not all media that has the “robo parts replacing human parts” has this aspect--for example, if a character chooses to have their body parts replaced because robot parts are better, that’s not about disabled people, that’s about transhumanism--here the robot parts are pretty clearly prosthetics, so! don’t use symbolism without context, kids!)

but also, it doesn’t work as a metaphor for his paternalism, ableist elements aside. what ironwood actually wrongly sacrificed was the safety of his people (the “few city blocks”), not that he sacrificed his arm to stop watts... then... stupidly allowed him to live... instead of... killing him... because... uhhhhhhhhhhh... i guess he lost a few brain cells along with that arm! GOTTEM! (was taiyang... right? do people in the rwbyverse have some amount of brain-cells-that-do-the-thinking-thing in their arms? is that why cinder is so dumb?)

“ohhh look the humans are acting like robots and the robots are acting like humans!!! ooooh!!!” which... might be fine elsewhere, but it doesn’t work here! emotions have nothing to do with it!

and like, the worst thing is, even if they didn’t fuck it up, ironwood having this depth of character simply doesn’t matter. the main plot of the show isn’t about the state of Humanity (TM), it’s about some woman who fell into black goo and is really angery and wants to destroy the world. and once you ratchet up the stakes to “the world is going to be destroyed because of some stupid reason that isn’t even the fault of anybody! it’s just an evil wizard!” then like, it’s all for nothing. for ironwood’s flaws to matter, the overall plot has to give it a reason to be nuanced without having him be an idiot (eg letting watts survive lmao) or letting him fall to the wayside because his villainy would otherwise have nothing to do with the main conflict.

like fuck dude, imagine if salem had this depth instead of a backstory and motivation that mean nothing and go nowhere! she’d actually be a good character!

#qed: salem is such a bad character #maybe the worst character in the show #me.txt #rwby #rwde #salem #james ironwood #just didn't want to clog up your mentions especially considering how infrequently i post and the fact i'm not able to respond without #making a new reblog altogether... which makes responding kind of a pain #begone thought

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sid471 · 3 years

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Hiiiiiii I’m maaaaaad >_>

If you’re arguing with someone, and you bring Monty’s name into it in a negative way, you immediately lose any sympathy or validity to your claims in my mind. Because I don’t think you really care about Monty’s vision when you do that. When I see “Yeah but this is against Monty’s vision.” I hear “I don’t actually care about Monty’s vision, I just mention the creator’s name because I know it makes people feel bad.” Which... THAT is against Monty’s vision .-. I KNOW Monty is watching his friends and family and smiling at them and their progress.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, I’ll say it infinity more times >_>. Monty worked with these people for YEARS. And there’s literally family in the crew. Do you REALLY think that Neath Oum would let something that his own BROTHER would be against into the show? .-. No... No he wouldn’t ._. It’s not rocket science 😶

#RWBY #RWBY7 #RWBY6 #RWBY8 #Monty Oum #CRWBY #Anti RWDE #RWDE begone >_>#Siddy rambles #Siddy Rants

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yazmadranistan · 6 years

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#rwby #rwde #fndm #rwby meme #raven branwen #cinder fall #im so sorry i had to #actually im not #THOT #begone thot

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dragynkeep · 2 years

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We wouldn't be "screaming" about wasted potential if there wasn't so much wasted potential. Why is this guy popping up all of a sudden just to be annoying? Bro, get a hobby, like knitting.

If I had a nickel for every RWBY simp who decides to check the rwde tag just to piss themselves off, I'd buy NASA.

they have a hobby, it's called harassing rwby critics while dropping 4k a month on taisummer fanart.

oh also gaslighting people, being racist, defending a genocide & comparing the "htdm" to the "bad side of the autism spectrum" like. begone trash.

#rwby #rwde #missroseyred #canonseeker #answerseeker #answerseeker3 #owl.txt #answered #q #genocide /#racism /#ableism /

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inflammatoryfandomblog · 3 years

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one big reason people feel more for cinder than adam is that they showed cinder’s backstory on-screen instead of leaving it to deduction/implication (then later saying it just an accident in an interview lol)

(adam and cinder have pretty much the same backstory conceptually by the way, and they’re both bad people--both of them were mistreated in some way and slowly wanted Power (TM) and Violence (TM) and grew to relish in it)

“show don’t tell” is a repeated storytelling mantra for a reason. what part of adam’s backstory are we told? the dust mine stuff. what parts are we shown? him gradually becoming a more bloodthirsty villain. at no point do we ever get time dedicated to flashbacks of the bad aspects his life--cinder, however, did.

given that cinder’s pain got much more focus by the narrative... the natural response is that people feel more affected by it, whatever your opinion on the actual events are. we never see baby adam the way we got to see baby (?) cinder. her backstory is shown in a way that’s supposed to induce pathos; adam’s is relegated to the abstract within a world that isn’t cohesive on its own (the racism in remnant doesn’t feel real--which ties into how badly the topic was butchered in the show, but you can’t tug on a thread without unweaving the whole tapestry etc etc etc)

in storytelling, the way you deliver things is just as important as the content of the story itself. i’m not willing to chalk up the fans’ emotional reactions to cinder’s backstory to them being bad people. the story we are being told is written to evoke emotions in a certain way. like everything that touches the racism subplot, it’s bad writing. the story is set up in such a way that you felt nothing but “oh, this is bullshit!” for adam/the white fang in general.

#like yeah the rwby fandom honestly tends to be uncritical re: how the show approaches the topic of racism #cinder has lots of fans simply because she's attractive... i refuse to say the word 'simp'#also the fact that adam himself is such a hot topic in the fandom... in a bad way.#if you're new here: basically what i'm saying is that any critique of adam's character will get you branded as some incel or w/e #unhappy with the fact that adam's character is the main vehicle for the white fang #an organization that supposedly fights for equal rights... the only character (that doesn't get killed within 3 minutes of screentime)#that is willing to fight instead of wanting to milquetoastly sing kumbaya until the plot says things get better for the faunus #is also like a big evil domestic abuser with 0 redeeming qualities? you must hate #abusive survivors you dumb sicko! ... which is a thing some people actually believe #rwby #me.txt #begone thought #rwde #adam taurus

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inflammatoryfandomblog · 3 years

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i don’t actually think penny being able to be hacked or have her agency taken away from her in some way is contradictory to her having a sense of humanity/personhood. otherwise, qrow being influenced by alcohol means he’s not a person... because that’s an external thing that impacts how you think and behave!

in other words, i strongly think that people who think this is inherently a bad writing decision are mistaken. there is no contradiction here.

if anything i wish the show had actually gone somewhere that’s not “bad guys hacking penny lol.” penny is the winter maiden. imagine if, for example, was slated to be the winter maiden, because they could program her to think about a specific person X when she dies, which uses pre-established lore stuff in an interesting way. hell, even if the winter maiden was human and penny never existed, with atlas’s tech and the fact that souls are apparently malleable via tech, it’d be easy to put some neural implant that just flashes a specific person through your head. maybe, being a robot, her aura wouldn’t be accessible from the usual places via cinder’s grimm arm. etc.

idk i think there was potential here for adding meaning to the maidens--like, how people view them as merely keys/vessels for power--and how that could affect them or something, and there’s some paralellism with the idea of penny as a robot being viewed as a tool.

but ofc that would... challenge... the viewer and doesn’t easily fit into the way we think about this stuff normally, ie. “HUMANITY = 100% FREE WILL ALL THE TIME BAYBEE; OTHERWISE, YOU BELIEVE THAT WE HAVE NO FREE WILL AT ALL”

#rwby #penny polendina #rwde #ish #me.txt #begone thought

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inflammatoryfandomblog · 4 years

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the reason some people dislike jaune as a character doesn’t have much to do with jaune himself “as a person” as it did their perception that the writers put too much focus on him, notably in volume 2 and 4. they may additionally dislike his role in pyrrha’s arc.

the reason others dislike adam taurus as a character (count me among them) is that the psycho-ex boyfriend thing was 0% compelling and his mustache-twirling villainy grew on the white fang plot like a malignant tumor and metastasized until all the gray was taken out of it. (ex. sienna khan was killed on-screen the first time she was mentioned via adam, adam is consistently the stand-in for the entire white fang at nearly all times in the plot, and he’s absolutely insane)

the reason yet others dislike blake now as a character when they didn’t necessarily in the first 3 volumes is the fact that she all-lives-mattered” the faunus subplot (which is yes, connected to adam because they’re the major players in the same terrible subplot) and basically said “lol it’s our fault the humans hate us!”

etc

being dissatisfied with a character in the context of the role they play in a story is perfectly reasonable. characters aren’t real people. by definition, they are artificial--none of these characters ended up this way because of real-life cause-and-effect; they develop and maneuver through the story because they are written that way.

not saying that some critique can’t be flawed or plain... bad? but the tendency to treat fictional characters as real people and anybody who has a differing opinion of you as mean and toxic SJWs/Alt-reichers is annoying and i’m sick of seeing it on my dash.

#rwde #me.txt #begone thought #tag later #i don't know why i am seeing so many posts treating these characters as real people #they're not real... they're not real... that's why their actions can say something in a wider narrative!#that's why we can talk about themes and shit!#christmas is over time for salt... will resume trying to be offline lolz

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inflammatoryfandomblog · 4 years

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honestly, ozpin is kind of annoying. he’s not an idealist, he literally has his head so far up his ass that it’s in the clouds. sure he talks about trust and ideals and how that’s needed to stop the grimm, but he has no qualms about using the threat of the grimm as a cudgel (”it will cause panic!”) in order to stomp any disagreement with him or distrust of him... i wonder where ironwood learned all that from lolz.

he manages to be a hypocrite and at the same time somehow only think of the world in terms of hollow symbolism. that’s it. like the braindead idea to create atlas (and thus directly contributing to the increasing stratification of mantle) was his. because apparently the people of mantle needed to look up to something, and the only way that could happen is if you literally used the relic of creation to build a new ... settlement... filled with rich people.. that is a direct security threat to the people below it because salem is after that relic you dumbass. good job!

i mean, there are things like this littered through the entire series. his hollow speeches aside, ozpin is implied to be the mind behind things like the color naming scheme, but also... he routinely allies himself with people who he realllly shouldn’t be allied with because... uh... well, the systems that people are knee-deep in doesn’t matter, ironwood is a Good Guy With Good Intentions, so it’s all good, right?

and i think this points to a larger issue wherein rwby is reallllly scared to talk about systems and structures in any good way. it talks about vague ideas and has no idea where to go with them. the show as-written doesn’t put the blame on atlas’s fall on ironwood being corrupt or being part of a corrupt system (one the the arc villains is the only guy who was an actual threat to his power and wanted to reduce it! jacques! fucking jacques!!!), it’s because he’s toxically masculine and he’s a military guy or whatever. if he were only a better person who listened to team rwby and trusted people! all of this could have been resolved!

you see something like this in the conclusion to the white fang arc, which is essentially something like “oh! structural racism didn’t matter, the real problem was this Bad Guy adam taurus who was really just casting us all in a bad light, if we’re really nice to the humans you guys and police ourselves, surely the humans will like us!” essentially blake’s speech in menagerie. no matter how many throwaway lines about structural racism they make marrow spit out, it will not erase the conclusion of the major arc of one of the main characters.

in rwby, authority is inherently good and just, even when they include story elements that contradict it. ozpin’s role in maintaining it has never been questioned (and is justified post-hoc via salem--which magically doesn’t work as a justification when ironwood is in the picture and forces the viewer to think about what that means--if rwby were a smart show, they’d show ironwood and ozpin being two reflections of each other but uhhh) and in fact can’t be questioned if he must remain the Good Guy.

(a reasonable response to this is point right back at ironwood and robyn as an example of how rwby doesn’t imply that authority is inherently good. fair enough, but i don’t think that’s sufficient for me with all the other elements of the show taken together. for example, i would like to point to this contrast: ironwood, the major authority figure, is conceived and portrayed to be far more sympathetic than another “fallen” villain, adam taurus, who represents (no, sienna showed up to be killed off by him for one scene to bolster his “power level,” she’s never functionally the leader of anything) the white fang, a rebel faction and like, this isn’t me wanting to cancel ironwood’s portrayal, i have no problems with it taken alone, but the contrast is really telling about rwby’s implicit ideas.)

and like! it’s too late to go for a theme like that! they tried tackling complex issues like racial prejudice as explicitly morally gray since volume 1! if you wanted to create a world where people can just hold hands and sing kumbaya and defeat the evil without thinking about it too much, you shouldn’t have put problems that can’t be solved by singing and banding together and trusting love uwu.

#rwby #rwde #idk what else to tag this as #begone thought #me.txt #this is why the most likable thing ironwood has ever done is shoot oscar once he starting speaking like ozpin

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inflammatoryfandomblog · 5 years

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adam is the worst character in the show, and here’s why.

is what I would call this ranty post if I really wanted to clickbait and get that nice tasty Tumblr Fame, but Adam himself isn’t really who I want to talk about. He also is the guy I have to talk about.

For the longest time in the show, he was the face of the White Fang--until the Volume 4 reveal that Blake was the daughter of the ex-White Fang leader. And up until the present day, he is essentially the face of the violent White Fang movement.

I’m not convinced at all by the argument that Sienna is the face of the “new” violent White Fang to the audience. From a screenwriting perspective, she was a higher-up to be killed in order to bolster Adam’s position as a threat to the main characters. She was there to essentially give you an idea of Adam’s influence in order to make him seem like a “bigger” villain. Her existence in the story proper amounted to one scene in service to Adam’s status as a villain. Nothing changed--the audience assumed that Adam was the leader of the violent White Fang before, and now it’s been confirmed with an aspirational-GoT-like pizzazz.

Which is a shame, because from the brief glimpse we got of her, she seemed to be an interesting continuation of the themes of violence set up by RWBY. A violent leader, but not in the genocidey, psychopathic way Adam was. At various times, the show actually raises this idea of using violence in social movements, and at least implies that there’s a cost-benefit analysis at work there.

The reason the White Fang turned to violence in the first place was that peaceful methods weren’t working--see V1 Chapter 16: Black and White

Blake says, of the new leader, which we now know to be Sienna Khan, “A new leader, with a new way of thinking. Suddenly our peaceful protests were being replaced with organized attacks. We were setting fire to shops that refused to serve us. Hijacking cargo from companies that used faunus labor. And the worst part was? it was working! We were being treated like equals. But not out of respect... out of fear.”

From very early on, RWBY set up this idea of a dialogue or contrast between violent and non-violent movements, and people, even the most casual fans who uncritically consumed the show picked up on this. For the longest time, the White Fang was one of the most interesting and intriguing aspects of the setting because of this. It was also intimately tied to at least two of our main girls--Weiss and Blake. White and black. They weren’t being subtle about what it was supposed to evoke.

There’s a lot of history and a lot that has been written about the interplay of violent and nonviolent movements. People much smarter than I am have written literal volumes upon volumes about this. But we all know how the popular narrative of this plays out, right? How our history books frame it? Nonviolence is Always the Answer, it’s what the Good(TM) People opposed to oppression always did--and I’m a big supporter of nonviolence in general for a number of reasons, but never questioning its merits and assuming it as a default is naive and maybe even a bit dangerous. People get complacent with the notion that it’s the Best Way without exploring why that is, and how nonviolent movements interact with violent ones.

And it was so refreshing to maybe, maybe get that theme explored. Blake had already made her decision between the two by the beginning of the show; she had already picked her side. She believed violence was going to be ineffective in the long run--even though it was working for right now, so her arc, in order to continue, had to be a reckoning with her beliefs.

And RWBY was a webshow, right? It wasn’t limited by Executive Meddling, it had the space--however campy it might be--to legitimately engage with these sorts of ideas, even if it did it clumsily. It had the merits that pulp has writ large.

But then the face of all of that--the face of the White Fang, Adam Taurus--the face of the “violent” side--was revealed to be a genocidal abusive ex (and abuse is not really a strong theme of the show or indeed even Blake’s arc as it actually panned out, if people are interested in why I think this, I’ll get to it later). And nothing really replaced him, not effectively, anyways.

Ilia was violent, but her arc was contaminated by Adam’s status as a rapey abusive creep--she was his follower, one of the people that knew Adam had killed Sienna. She had sympathetic motivations of course, she was a Complex Villain who thought violence was the answer "because it works!”, but she never gave the other side of the argument a fair shake. By the time the show got to her, she was a follower of Adam’s current White Fang, not Sienna’s, and thus existed to be a Confused Youth Who Never Wanted To Do The Wrong Thing, Really, she just chose violence because she was emotionally confused. During Ilia’s “redemption arc,” the show never really addresses the argument of violence working or the notion that “there’s two types of humans: the ones who hate and the ones who stand by and let the hate happen!” Nothing addresses Ilia’s actual beliefs that led her to the White Fang, she just is reformed by the power of... friendship? Forgiveness(TM)? But to be fair to her, nothing could really change her character by addressing her motivations, because admitting the violent White Fang might have a bit of a point now implicitly meant siding with Adam. Even when they were brought up, the merits and drawbacks of the violent White Fang’s philosophy were never actually addressed.

Sienna was really the last bastion of hope for anybody who even wanted a slightly nuanced discussion about this in the show--and the minute she appeared on screen, she was brought up, appeared to be a much more reasonable and level-headed leader than Adam was in the current state, and then was unceremoniously disposed to bolster his power level.

The leader that now represented nuance in the White Fang was stabbed through the stomach the moment she was introduced. It was as though the writers had acknowledged they set up this nuanced picture of the White Fang, said “yeah, here she is, now stop complaining,” and then killed her with this outrageous caricature of what “violent protest” meant. Yeah, they told us, here’s what you thought the White Fang was, and let’s just murder it in broad daylight.

That scene is when they dispensed of all nuance and metaphorically turned the White Fang into Furry ISIS. And it worked for most of the FNDM--Blake’s “White Fang arc” is over without meaningfully engaging with the themes it set up. All of this sleight of hand was possible because of the slow conflation of the violent arm of the White Fang with Adam Taurus, who is a Bad Guy So Therefore the Violent White Fang Guys Are Also Bad, Forget About What We Set Up Earlier, Shut Up, This Is A Show About Hot Girls Beating Up Monsters, You Idiots.

They borrowed the language of resistance to oppression and just ground it into the dust. Like... why spend all this time suggesting a theme you were never intent on having?

And like, I realize this reads like a disappointed rant--and it is--I’m sure I’ll be characterized as a “RWBY fangirl who stuck to her headcanons and not what the show actually presented.” So RWBY absolutely mangled its civil rights themes--so what’s the big deal, you histrionic banshee SJW? How does this actually hold down the show?

Well, half the main characters are intimately tied to the White Fang plotline--to the portion of the setting that deals with dealing with discrimination--and the weaker this plotline is, the more these characters suffer. Blake is the hardest-hit by this--she’s arguably the worst of the main four--but so is Weiss. Weiss just magically... stopped being racist and never had to reckon with it, so the most interesting part of her character was, too, erased.

And why did this happen? Because the showrunners at once a) made Adam into a straight-up cackling villain so that it would be Satisfying when he was defeated b) unquestionably made him the Face of the White Fang without really giving that role to anybody else--and indeed, actively quashing other candidates who fit that role.

And man, I haven’t even gotten into how annoying it is that Adam is also the guy that got the most striking bit of oppression in the entire show asdfadddddd there’s just. So much. Here. They didn’t have to write it like this but they did.

#rwde #rwby #me.txt #begone thought #dumbassessays

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inflammatoryfandomblog · 4 years

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why did blake and yang’s relationship have to be written in such a way that constantly draws parallels to previous toxicity in relationships (yang is compared to adam, blake is compared to raven) and unironically leads to posts like “yang losing her arm is a romantically-coded plot element?”

#rwde #me.txt #it's for quote unquote subtlety #begone thought

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inflammatoryfandomblog · 4 years

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so i could never really get behind blake “overcompensating” for leaving yang in volume 6, particularly all the scenes where she tries to help yang a bunch when yang doesn’t really need to be helped (see episode 1 when she unnecessarily helps yang take out her bag), and ofc the infamous “i’ll protect you!” line

now, certainly i’m not saying that blake is like, a bad person for feeling guilty about yang’s disability and trying to make up for it, only that she acts really thoughtless about it... and that can still be a dick move.

it seemed to me at the time that the portrait they were painting was pretty clear: what blake was doing, even though it came from good intentions, was ultimately kind of thoughtless trying to “make it up” to yang. by “helping” her even when she clearly could do things by herself and was independent, she was also kind of inifantilizing her a little bit, right? and that’s what yang was angry about when blake said “i’ll protect you!” to me it was the logical boiling point of that.

you don’t even have to be very clued-in to the disabled to pick this up. if you’re able-bodied, you’ve probably acted like blake without even thinking that it might be condescending. none of these scenes are cute uwu, they show a real disconnect between the two characters.

i thought that they were going somewhere with this--but it seemingly gets resolved... off-screen? there’s no realization point for blake, they never talk it out or anything... it just... disappears? perhaps they didn’t realize what they had written? because the conclusion to this subplot... series of events?... thing that... the characters... would naturally react to.. is really underwhelming.

#rwde #me.txt #rwby #begone thought

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inflammatoryfandomblog · 4 years

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on blake and running away

this post will be just me rambling about some tension i’ve noticed in the show for the longest time, yeah? i'm not trying to like, take people’s favorite characters away from them or whatever, but it’s me trying to come to terms with the fact that “running away” seems to be a very common theme for WBY... and for BY, it’s handled a bit oddly.

adam is mentioned as a matter of course, but i don’t really look at him the way you are used to--i don’t talk about the race stuff at all. i exclusively look at his abuse to Blake here; let it not be said that i’m so hung up on the race stuff that i ignore this part of his character. but if talk about abuse triggers you, you may not want to read this--it doesn’t really talk about personal experience at all and it’s not graphic, but this is a deeply personal Topic so i will warn you right now.

since this is long (no, really, it’s long as hell because it takes some explaining, and it’s more me trying to wrap my head around this than coming to a conclusion), i’ll stick it under a readmore:

Hello there!

Now, let’s all get on the same page, shall we? We all know that Adam’s a slimy creep in the show, right? And that most of his words to Blake should be taken in the context of what he intends to do and comes forth from his character?

This is a pretty basic observation... the things that characters say can be safely assumed to have a purpose in some way. Like Adam saying “my dear” or “wow we finally have alone time!” or whatever crap isn’t meant to be taken at face value as romantic, right? In fact, because Adam is (supposed to be) charismatic and an emotional abuser, you should generally assume there is some ulterior motive to what he says. (If this isn’t obvious to you, see Blake telling Yang that Adam only has power because of his manipulation in the Brunswick Arc.)

Which kind of strikes me as weird because... this isn’t really in line with how the writer’s depend on Adam’s dialogue sometimes? At certain points you’re supposed to take his framing as basically true--think of when he yells “what does she even see in you?” which ... is supposed to be taken by the audience as “see, even Adam sees their relationship, in case you haven’t gotten it yet!” rather than the kind of meaningless unhinged statement an abusive, jealous controlling asshole would make,

And like, if it were limited to rare instances like this, I wouldn’t really care about it that much, I would just take the unnatural dialogue as the audience clue-ins they’re meant to be and take Adam’s talkativeness in the final fight as RT being excited that Garrett Hunter can finally do the bare minimum of voice acting. But the reason it bugs me is because Adam was previously used to outright tell us Blake’s supposed character flaw of running away and we were just... supposed to take it at face value?

So, Adam constantly taunts Yang during their volume 6 fight, reminding her of Beacon to no end. And if you know Adam’s character, you’d know that this is meant to be intimidating shit-talking to Yang and to get her to attack him. It’s not even really subtle. “You’re a coward! Just like [Blake]” etc etc etc

(The fact that it doesn’t really work at all in this fight and he fucking keeps taunting her even when it clearly doesn’t work is the reason why Adam is annoying as hell during that fight. I’m salty that I was forced to be put through his voice acting, yes, I’m allowed to be petty.)

Remember this line of dialogue from him, because it’ll be important later: “You’re a coward! Just like her!” He frames her running away as a flaw pretty consistently, and this actually lines up with her character arc:

So flashback to the earlier volumes, right? Blake’s self-identified flaw is that she “always runs away” in volume 2. In that infamous volume 3 fight, Adam says, in response to Blake’s “I’m not running!”: “You will.” And that’s what happens, and it’s supposed to fuel most of the Yang-Blake drama in subsequent volumes.

Volume 4 has Blake outright say that the reason she ran away was because she wants her friends to hate her so they can be safe, and Sun basically tells her, “you don’t have to be alone, your friends are here.”

In volume 5, Yang reinforces that this is supposed to be a trait of Blake, and it’s also framed negatively: “she ran!” Now Weiss contextualizes this in their talk by basically saying that Blake is lonely and she ran away because she wanted to protect them, and Yang repeats the whole notion of “she doesn’t have to run! We were here for her.” In that very same volume, Blake “now he can see what it feels like to run away” when she successfully out-organizes Adam. The parallel between Blake now having Support and Backup and Therefore She Doesn’t Need to Run Away Anymore, while Adam Lost His Influence and Therefore Must Run Away.

In the V6 ending song “Nevermore,” Blake’s first singing part implies that her running away is a character flaw that she got over by killing Adam:

Will I be afraid (Adrienne) Nor will I run away (Casey) It's behind me (Adrienne + Casey) Freedom is finally here (Casey)

So it’s clear that the story the show wants you to take away from this is that Blake always runs away because she views herself as a burden to her friends and won’t let them help her, and she needs to open up more and be more confident in her value as a person and push people away. Her arc is about that in volume 5, where she defeats people via the Power of Friendship. She spells out her character arc to Sun in volume 5, chapter 5:

“I’m going to try and help [Ilia] the way you helped me. You showed me that sometimes you need to be there for a friend even when they don’t want you to be. I was drowning in guilt and fear, and I tried to push you away, but you didn’t give up on me. And I can’t give up on Ilia; it’s about time I saved my friends for once.”

Blake’s character arc post-season 3 revolves around being comfortable with relying on support and supporting others, and that helpfully stops her from running away and lets her face her big problems.

This would all be all well and good if it weren’t for the fact that running away actually isn’t the bad thing that the show tries to frame it to be, if you were to judge by what actually happened in the events of the show and the actions of other characters, and this is where my big beef with Blake’s arc comes from. I’m going to argue that running away wasn’t actually a character flaw Blake had at all, and the show treating it as such is it basically siding with Adam on this particular issue.

Blake has run away 3 times in the show’s runtime thus far.

1. The first time was in the Black Trailer

2. The second time is in volume 1 when she inadvertently reveals herself as an ex-White Fang member to Weiss

3. The last time is during the epilogue to volume three when she absconds to Menagerie

All three instances were actually valid and ended up being good for Blake. (1) is her escaping an abusive relationship. (2) leads to her finding Sun and opening up to a fellow faunus for once. (3) is Blake running away back to a support system she already had--her parents, who are pretty loving and accepting of her. The fact that she ran away might be the best thing Blake did--yeah, it wasn’t perfect, Yang was hurt--but objectively, Blake reconnected with the people who love her unconditionally and she was also there to save her parents from being murdered by Adam.

To pile on to these instances, Blake’s personality is actually rather confrontational. She constantly gets in arguments with Weiss in volume 1, and in volume 2, her character arc is basically her freaking out because they weren’t doing enough about Torchwick.

But but but--! I hear the objection to this statement--Blake in volume 2 herself said that she always runs away from her problems! Checkmate atheists!

Well, dear reader, it’s not. Self-perception isn’t necessarily always true, especially if you’ve been emotionally abused before, as Blake has been. In volume 2, Blake sees herself as a coward who runs away all the time even though this is directly contradicted by her personality and actions.

Now, who in her past might benefit from framing “running away” as a bad thing? That leaving him to “run away” to other people means she’s a coward?

If you bothered to remember the quote I told you to remember earlier, it’s Adam! Adam stands everything to gain by telling Blake that running away is Bad; stay with me, Blake, don’t run and abandon me like your parents did. This would be the most striking and lasting example of emotional abuse, directly related to Blake’s self-perception and tying into a lot of the things she does in the show.

Would be. But the show sort sides with Adam here--running away is Bad. Adam is, according to the explicit messages of RWBY, what the show wants you to believe, right in saying that Blake always runs away.

But she doesn’t. Hell, she doesn’t even run away from him when the going gets tough, and Adam himself doesn’t even believe that Blake is a coward. Remember the first time she him saw in in volume 3? They were really far apart and Blake could have just ran, but Adam stabbed a random civvie knowing that Blake would rush in to protect him. And like clockwork, Blake indeed did attack Adam to try to prevent harm.

(And yes, Adam used the exact same trick to lure Yang into attacking him, except instead of stabbing a nondescript extra, he stabbed Blake. Connections!)

This kind of stuff partially why I’ve always been uncomfortable with the abuse backstory, because much like the racism stuff that I have a problem with, the show just... ignores the big elephant in the room. Blake already had this self-image discrepancy going on in the first 3 volumes, but it never properly gets addressed again. Like with the violent-but-not-extremist White Fang and Sienna, it gets a throwaway line to explain its absence: “Yeah, look, Adam called Yang a coward! We’ll just vaguely nod at this!” But Blake’s arc proper? There’s nothing about coming to terms with her running away or using it as a concrete in-story example of her untangling Adam’s abuse--that might actually get people uncomfortable, you see--so it slowly gets morphed into the safer and easier plotline of “see, you just need to let yourself rely on people!”

And it’s weird that it got dropped so easily because “running away” is pretty much a... not a theme, but a thing three of the four main girls have going on. Yang has abandonment issues because her mother up and ran away--in fact, the language of how Running Away is Bad and Cowardly is brought up in the talk-ju-jitsu scene with Raven.

This is probably the easiest connection in the world to make--Raven and Blake both ran away, but as far as Yang is concerned, it’s okay with Blake because... “she came back,” which... uh??? uhhhh???? It uncritically accepts that Running Away is a Bad Thing--it’s the coming back part (which wasn’t even an intentional thing on Blake’s end; she didn’t even know RWBY would be there) that “redeems” Blake’s sin--see Yang’s “you came back!” and Weiss’s “she will [come back.]”

Which... is actually kind of weird in light of how Running Away vis-a-vis Blake is handled (ie, she gets the notion that it’s a bad thing from Adam--but certainly she shouldn’t go back to him). The show didn’t need to do everything in its power to frame Running Away as a bad thing; it could acknowledge that while it may hurt somebody, running away is sometimes the best thing you can do, and this could actually tie into Yang’s abandonment issues, because if there was a character that also needed untangling with the concept of Running Away, it was her.

But it seems like Blake and Yang won’t really talk about any of this in the future, because we can’t have conflict because of people’s differing experiences with running away, apparently. Blake’s act at the end of volume 3 did hurt Yang and potentially... swept under the rug, because Blake Came Back, Guys! We can put a ring on it now. Because getting over abuse is always straightforward, you will never make mistakes trying to heal yourself, and there are never hard decisions to make!

I never see people talk about this, so maybe it’s worth a mention. But Weiss is also technically guilty of Running Away--from an abusive household, in this case, much like her sister. And here, much like with Blake, it’s a good thing. But with Weiss, the narrative actually admits that leaving was the right thing to do for herself and her character arc is actually about that. So it’s exceedingly strange for me that Blake doing the exact thing Weiss does is a “flaw” she had to get over, instead of something that could be looked at and digested.

Blake’s experience with abuse is an element that never seemed to really resonate with me personally, because what I saw on screen and what was implied didn’t add up perfectly. I like the message of “support systems matter” of Blakes volume 4-5 arc in concept, but it never felt exactly right, because what Blake actually resolved and what was visibly her problem never felt 1:1 to me.

#rwde #me.txt #rwby #begone thought #dumbassessays

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