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shintarou-blog · 6 years ago

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You all should read this. I was quite annoyed when I wrote my thoughts but this is exactly how I feel.

Adam Taurus, Bumblebee/y and Seeing Red from the lens of someone who hasn’t been in the FNDM since 2015

Let me preface this by saying that I’m not particularly someone who really is into shipping or really defends or excuses Adam’s actions. I like most characters in RWBY - Adam, Blake and Yang included, but I’m someone who likes to analyze from an objective standpoint and I hope I can get my point across without drawing any ire. If you wish to politely discuss things respectfully and in a friendly manner, my DMs are always open! But with that out of the way, let me get right into it.

I’ll dissect this in two segments: the first half regarding RW, JPR, Qrow, Oscar and Caroline and then the Adam vs. Blake and Yang section.

Let me get this out from the get-go: the main characters in this circumstances are, indubitably, the bad guys. This sounds like a very harsh and extreme assessment, but really there is no other way to put it. Ruby addresses Caroline most of the time in a way that makes it sound like, in a way, she feels she is entitled to travel to Atlas because she has set the burden of Remnant on her shoulders, and she has! But Caroline knows nothing about Salem, about WTCH and about her and Ozpin’s centennial long feud. She is merely a high-ranking soldier defending the base in Argus after she was entrusted with it by General Ironwood himself. Now, I’m saying that our main characters are the bad guys, but Caroline herself is also being extremist. We’ve already seen glimpses of her incredibly patriotic personality and her radical way of treating our main characters, threatening to send all of her armed forces against them.

While she is justified in her demanding our main characters surrender herself considering they’ve stooped so low as to committing highway robbery (or would it be airway robbery in this case?) and assaulting members of the Atlas Military. At this point they are actually, inexcusable criminals! And yes, I do understand that Caroline stood in their way and that she blatantly denied their request to at least confirm what they were saying with General Ironwood. Does this make her, from a narrative standpoint, an antagonist? Yes! But let’s remember that she has absolutely no reason to believe these groups of teenagers who refuse to tell the full truth to her! Not to mention that, if the Atlas Military does indeed follow the real-life rules of the military, then lower-rank members can’t just contact high-ranking soldiers willy-nilly. Often you even need a permission and appointment to just speak with them. Is Caroline justified to deny our main character’s request? Yes! But this doesn’t mean she’s in the right either.

The moment she was defied she not only used excessive force but also busted out a giant mech suit to use against the protagonists. It’s overly-ridiculous why she would even do something like this! At this point, it was only a matter of time before the two of them engaged in battle considering they’re in opposite sides. Now, regarding the fight itself, I won’t comment too much other than it’s just laughable a group of not even fully experienced hunters are able to tear holes through the robot… Not to mention how silly it is for the mech’s shield to not cover its entire body and it’s just blatantly awful how easily it was to dispatch of its shields and its rocket launcher design is just practically unreliable in any and all ways. The mech is just filled with unnecessary weaknesses that are very exploitable, so much for the might of high end and cutting edge Atlas technology… But that’s besides the point. It just, ultimately, feels like both sides are wrong but, from an objective standpoint, our main characters are ultimately causing Caroline to have to resort to forceful military intervention seeing as they won’t listen to her and she won’t listen to them.

Now this can only end up badly for Argus considering it’s been left entirely unprotected because Ruby and Jaune thought it would be a good idea to attempt and cross the Atlas Military. Ultimately, this is like saying the Brothers were the villains to Salem’s story, as they refused to upset the balance of Life and Death by bringing Ozma back after he expired even though it was Salem’s own selfishness that ultimately lead the Brothers to wipe the board clean after all of humanity had unified under Salem and decided to reject them, forcing them to get rid of Humanity until its eventual restoration. And now that Ruby, in her selfishness, decided to take down Argus’ greatest defensive weapon against supersized Grimm because she wanted to travel to Atlas fast and as soon as possible, it’s likely several more lives are going to be sacrificed. In the end they decided their own goals are more important than the rest of the lives in all of Argus, including Jaune’s sister’s family and likely Pyrrha’s relative too. It feels like they didn’t not only earn their victory against Caroline due to that robot’s massive defects but also like they learned nothing from the Battle for Beacon and Haven.

Now, of course there’s the second part and… This one is frankly the one I’m the most afraid of discussing, but… Just hear me out. Please don’t instaclick your ‘Block’ buttons and just take your time to listen to me.

I’ll summarize this first by saying the following things: Did I think Yang’s PTSD was accurately represented not just in this battle but throughout the Volumes? Arguably… Yes. Did I think Blake and Yang overcoming Adam was done fruitfully? Yes. Did I think Adam deserved to die? Yes. Did I think he deserved to die now? No. Did I think he deserved redemption? Hard no. Did I think Blake and/or Yang should’ve been able to individually defeat Adam? Hard no for Blake and an arguable no for Yang, but if it I had to decide I’d say she’d be able to keep up with him the most. Lastly, should Blake and Yang be able to take down Adam by working together? Absolutely.

Now to elaborate, let me say this… I know PTSD and abusive relationships from experience, and neither are pretty. This is obvious of course. PTSD is a mental condition which you can work at to get better but you can never truly get rid of it. Some of the more common symptoms are anxiety, paranoia, hallucinations, nightmares, flashbacks, body tremors and overall very nasty reactions to things that remind you of your trauma. Yang’s PTSD throughout the volumes was related to Adam and to fights in general, but while her PTSD was shown affecting her severely at first, besides handshakes and hallucinations, there wasn’t really much shown regarding her condition. I understand she talked and sparred with Taiyang, but truthfully you can talk to someone and that’ll still not really help you overcome entirely such mentally and emotionally taxing condition. Even with her PTSD and fear of battles, Yang still jumped recklessly into battles and she still came out winning. It genuinely feels like while she did get better, she didn’t truly learn anything from her past experiences. I don’t think she should’ve had a mental breakdown upon seeing Adam, but rather that more than her just shaking should’ve been shown.

Throughout the volume she still does experience visions of Adam and is utterly horrified by his mere visage, this very vividly represents to us that, despite what we might want to believe, Yang isn’t truly over her condition and still struggles dealing with even the idea of Adam being nearby! So, with this, the least we can realistically expect from her fight with Adam is to, for once, NOT recklessly dive in to fight him… Except that’s exactly what she does. She’s gotten training with Taiyang, sure, but Adam is a skilled swordsman who has been fighting for far longer than Yang has, so the very least is for her to be able to keep up with him but not have the massive advantage she displayed in The Lady in the Shoe. It would’ve been pleasant to see her hesitating more and being shown how she’s struggling to not give in to her fear of him. If, in the previous episodes, they would’ve shown her have a more relaxed and accepting response to her hallucinations rather than the fearful expressions she displayed then it’d make more sense for her to be so confident and reckless fighting Adam, but this wasn’t what happened, so it feels like she just had a massive boost to her mental and physical capacities that came out of seemingly nowhere.

Now as for Adam himself? While I understand he was meant to be nothing more than a foil to Blake and - to an extent, Yang - I still feel like his character was misued. For all the show tells about how Faunus are discriminated against, the truth is we’ve never seen true discrimination throughout the Volume. Adam is the only Faunus that we have canon evidence to have been witness and victim of Faunus oppression through the branding of his face and for having constantly fought Humans who tried to hurt those he cared about while the White Fang was being led by Ghira. His radical views could’ve made a great foil for not just Blake throughout the series but he could’ve represented the ideology that Humans help only in creating monsters like Adam by treating them the way they do and a great opposite on how Adam and Blake go about bettering the Faunus’ conditions; with Blake’s kind but seemingly ineffective method and Adam’s more sadistic and merciless tactics. In short, I feel like he still could’ve played a more important role in the whole Humans vs. Faunus debacle going on in the background.

The world is not black and white, it’s grey, and these two could’ve been great polar opposites; the fire to each other’s water, but this idea wasn’t sadly explored. He could’ve been more than just the former, stalking, abusive and controlling ex-boyfriend. Especially with recent revelations of his suffering at the hands of the Schnee Dust Company. His personal vendetta could’ve even been centered against the Schnee Dust Company or even Weiss herself instead of just Blake. He could’ve been more than that, but I respect and understand the decision Kerry and Miles took when writing him. I wouldn’t call it bad or lazy writing as much as I just feel like it is a greatly missed opportunity.

I understand Adam, or for the matter, any other ‘minor’ characters are only part of Team RWBY’s story and not truly 100% part of it, but what I don’t think many people grasp is that they’re STILL part of the story and they should be fleshed-out some more than just being given tiny glimpses of their past. And this doesn’t apply to just Adam. It applies to every other character besides the members of RWBY! We know barely anything about JNPR and about STRQ, SSSN or CFVY. We don’t even know anything about WTCH’s motivations or even Emerald and Mercury and they’re the main villains! They feel, comparably, flat to the main cast. They’re all part of THEIR story. They’re not the focus but time and effort should be put into getting to know these characters more. I won’t fault them for their writing, but it’s inevitable for the fans to think that they could’ve done better, but that’s true for almost every piece of media, because no one’s a perfect writer and there’s always going to be faults.

While I am not really pleased to see Adam go and do indeed feel like he was a missed opportunity for a great villain, it is what it is. His death, however, was executed marvelously. Ideally, for me, it would’ve been better if individually the two wouldn’t be able to overcome Adam because he would be faster, stronger, every single bit the monster Yang imagined him to be, but once together and understanding each other again, they’d slowly get the advantage on him and defeat him. Symbolically, it would’ve made a lot of sense considering how intrinsically tied to each other Blake and Yang are, but frankly with how Chapter 11 went, it doesn’t really feel like Blake even had to fight at all considering how easy Yang was beating him around without him landing a single hit on her. It could’ve been performed better but ultimately the way he was killed fell more in line with what I had in mind.

His death feels bittersweet. Sure, they got rid of a terrible person, but one you couldn’t help but feel sympathy for because he wasn’t born a monster, he was made a monster by humanity. He was spiteful, but he was also broken and damaged inside, and rather than heal, he followed on the path of revenge. I’ve formed part of an abusive relationship. I was mentally, emotionally and verbally manipulated, deceived, cheated on, and gaslighted. I felt connected to Adam in a way because he, too, was likely treated that way by the S.D.C. but I saw him as a victim of his circumstances. That’s what made him so powerful. There’s rarely any characters that are truly shown to be the producers of what they were once the victims of. I wanted Adam to continuously evolve and direct his hatred at the S.D.C., at humanity. Him to confront Weiss so she could see his scar and show the kinds of racism and crimes her father was responsible of. Adam’s actions were deplorable and that’s why I, personally, wanted him to continue hurting others in his effort to ‘right’ the Faunus against humanity. He could’ve been an interesting side-villain completely unrelated to Salem’s circle, but again that’s just why I feel he shouldn’t have died at this current moment. Death wasn’t necessary for Blake and Yang to overcome him, but for the narrative it presented it made sense.

It’s not a happy moment for anyone. Blake breaks down and Yang does the best she can, which is to support her friend through her pain. Adam did once care for her after all and she was likely the first person to show him any compassion or anything like that regarding his branding, hence why I think she’s so attached to her, and she was attached to him too. His descent into the madman he is now was slow and gradual and Blake herself says that while they were together as both mentor and student and potentially lovers he was a different man. He let his revenge drive him where he was now and she no longer saw eye-to-eye with him. She left because she stopped believing in him. And now parting with him permanently hurts her. It’s not a time for jokes about how he’s finally gone, it’s not a Bumblebee shipping moment where they could kiss. It was an emotionally-charged scene where we see two broken but healing girls finally overcome their biggest hurdle yet, but to do so they had to take a life, and that’s something that’s certainly going to weigh heavily on them because no matter what Adam did to them, they’re Huntresses and their job is to protect life, not get rid of it. But ultimately they did what had to be done. Adam was far too gone to truly be redeemed or reasoned with.

Now, I’ve been in the FNDM since 2015 and let me tell you though, male characters have almost always been bashed by the majority of fans… Jaune, Mercury, Neptune, Sun… All of them have received such a huge amount of hate with the only one exempt from this being Lie Ren, though I feel that’s more because his character was, at the time, seen just as Monty’s self-insert. Regardless, it just feels like female characters don’t nearly receive the same amount of scrutiny and hatred as male characters do… People in the tags are calling Adam an abusive and pedophilic, psychopathic bastard, and while I agree on most of those, isn’t it kind of hypocritic to call him out on that when there’s another character who falls on the same category? I’m talking about Ilia. I understand and respect Ilia, but she, too, preyed on Blake while she was young considering she doesn’t look any different than Adam does in the Adam trailer too. I’ve seen the tag and I see nothing but love and praise for her and I just ask to myself if the FNDM’s changed at all from these past three years… And then there’s another character who shares many traits with Adam but sees no criticism other than “she’s flat and boring.” This character being Cinder Fall herself.

Adam at the very least could’ve been a vehicle to represent how oppressed and endangered Faunus could and would fight back in such extremist and reckless ways if left unchecked or unsupported but Cinder just falls flat precisely because she doesn’t represent anything, and I just ask myself… Where’s the Cinder hatred for also abusing and manipulating Emerald and Mercury? Where’s the Cinder hatred for leading to the mass-death of several innocent Vale civilians through Grimm attacks? Where’s the Cinder hatred for killing Pyrrha? Where’s the Cinder hatred for being even more obsessed with hurting and killing Ruby than Adam was with Blake? Where’s Cinder’s hate for killing Ozpin’s previous incarnation and scarring Weiss in the same way Adam did with Blake? Where’s the Cinder hatred for being a terrorist? It feels almost like all of these awful actions are either ignored or just, swept under the rug either because no one cares about Cinder or because she’s a woman and it’s just honestly saddening how hypocritical the FNDM can be sometimes…

Anyways this post is already far too long to the point I doubt anyone’s going to read it so I’ll just leave it there. If anyone wants to talk to me and engage in friendly and respectful discussion, my DMs are completely open! Just, please no insults or slurs. I know there’s bound to be hate comments but let’s try to keep it respectful ok?

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