#don’t bs me bc of this I am just being rational throughout | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

firelxdykatara · 3 years

Note

P1: The rwby fandom is being really weird about that scene with ironwood shooting slate huh? Cause it’s like you said: he doesn’t have a history of reacting violently to situations up until the very end of v7. Actually i remember ironwood being the one to stop winter from killing? (idk if she actually had the intent to kill but her blade was at his neck) Qrow in a fit of rage. And now you’re telling me Winter is terrified and shocked by ironwood killing slate. Idk i guess you could argue that

P2: that what ironwood did was a cold-blooded execution but still WHY? That still isn’t in-character for him from what we’ve seen so far. Maybe crwby realized that being afraid of salem doesn’t make james paranoid bc she’s a real threat so they decided to make james see threats everywhere. Threats that he desperately and “robotically” tries to eliminate. This would solve some problems with the writing while creating a whole lot of other problems that i don’t even want to get into

Honestly, I think you’ve hit the nail on the head.

For whatever reason, the writers/showrunners (is there a meaningful difference for a show like RWBY? genuine question, I’m not sure how the production is structured) decided they needed another villain. I’m not sure why, since they have a whole slew of villains and more than enough obstacles to throw at the heroes by keeping Ironwood as a morally grey ally with an opposing viewpoint, meaning he could very well have become an antagonist without getting yeeted over the moral event horizon on a rocketship. But whatever the reason (his heart or his shoes wait wrong show), they wanted to add to their cast of card-carrying evil villains, and picked Ironwood, and by extension anyone following him.

Rather than setting this up volumes in advance, though--for instance, by showing him reacting irrationally, with unnecessary violence, and these reactions getting more extreme despite not having concrete evidence that Salem was acting--what they did was have Ironwood act as a rational, reasonable man, who had to make some very tough choices. He never reacted with unwarranted aggression to any situation before volume 7--again, his ‘I’d have you shot’ comment was delivered with sarcasm in a moment of irritation, but there was no heat behind it, and he certainly wasn’t threatening to actually shoot Qrow--and he had very concrete reasons to set up the embargo and close Atlas’ borders.

He knew about Salem--he knew everything the heroes know, except the fact that she is immortal and can’t be destroyed, a secret which Ruby chose to keep and which, in the long run, did more harm than good (and yet none of them reflected on why Ozpin might have been keeping that secret in the first place, but I digress)--and he knew that her agents were acting in Remnant. He knew they were behind the Fall of Beacon, and he knew they all remained at large. Not a single one of the instigators of Beacon’s fall was captured in the aftermath. For all he knew, Atlas, the greatest remaining bastion of military strength and the only kingdom that might have a chance at defending against her if she chose to make her move (which he had every reason to believe she soon would, since this was the first time in centuries that she had acted directly to anyone’s knowledge), was going to be their next target. While global communications were down, he had no way of getting fast and reliable information from the other kingdoms. He could not risk spreading his forces too thin in an attempt to protect them without that knowledge--which is why his focus was on Amity Arena.

Get global comms back up and running, talk to the other kingdoms, warn them about Salem, and then they might have a chance. This was a plan, by the way, that team RWBY was all for, even though it meant that he would be setting up the entire world to fail because they knew Salem couldn’t be defeated. Ruby encouraged him to keep diverting resources from Mantle to finish the tower as quickly as he could. No one so much as mentioned the fact that if he did, and he told the world about Salem, they would be gearing up for a fight team RWBY&Co knew they would not be able to win.

Not until after James told the people of Atlas about Salem--again, without the crucial knowledge that she was immortal and they could not fight her.

So, notably, the entirety of volume 7 we see James Ironwood reacting reasonably, and rationally, to very real threats. We know Salem is a threat, we know the world is in danger--shit, we know Atlas is in danger, because Watts and Tyrian are there causing chaos. We see him take in the news that Salem is immortal much more calmly than I think the situation warranted--I would not have blamed him for exploding then, because the fact is that they didn’t give him this critical information until after it was nearly too late to act on it. And now he had an entire kingdom of people who likewise are laboring under the false belief that they have a chance against Salem, that she can be defeated, if they stick together. Which the protagonists know to be false, because if that were the case, then Jinn would have said as much to Oz when he asked how she could be destroyed.

(Which doesn’t mean that RWBY won’t pull some sort of ‘actually she only said Oz couldn’t, because he didn’t have the ability to unite the world [even though that’s bs], so team RWBY can kill her with the power of friendship actually’ ending out of a hat, but still, when it comes to characterization, we have to go by what the characters know and what they might reasonably believe based on the information they have--not meta knowledge we have as an audience because we’re genre savvy and can see the writing on the wall.)

None of his behavior throughout volume 7 indicated that he was on the verge of a complete mental break with reality that would lead him to start shooting people, including a child containing the soul of his best friend, in cold blood let and right. But I suspect that the crew was relying on the fandom having decided that James must be a bad guy, because he’s a military leader and military = bad, and the Ace Ops are effectively cops and cops = bad (even though if we’re going to call the Ace Ops cops, then we need to be calling all huntsmen cops, including Weiss, who performed a legal arrest on screen; if huntsmen have the authority to act as law enforcement officials, they are cops, period), and since they are already mostly bad, performing (and condoning, since there were six witnesses, four of them armed with auras, who just stood there and looked at each other after watching Ironwood gun a defenseless man down) cold-blooded murder is just the next logical step. Of course James would just murder a guy standing in between him and power, he’s a military leader, they’re all evil!

Nevermind the fact that Salem is literally right there, and if ever there was a situation that called for martial law to be legally enacted for the continued safety and protection of the kingdom (there’s a reason martial law exists, and there are reasons it can be justifiably enacted and enforced!!!!!) this is it.

Anyway.... yeah. I am unsurprised by the general fandom reaction--nevertheless, I’m disappointed by it. And I hope for the day in some nebulous future where the very idea of nuance and gray morality doesn’t just make a majority of them break out in hives.

#rwby #rwby meta #james ironwood #rwby v8 #rwby spoilers #rwby critical #rwby salt #asked #Anonymous

21 notes · View notes