#but sienna’s motivation for fighting Blake needs work

[unofficialadamtaurus]

Au where Blake confronts Adam in volume 4/5 on Menagerie and Sienna during the finale of volume 5 (with an actual fight not smacking her on the back like in the canon)

That is certainly an AU

[foulfirerebel]

True Weiss has tried to figure out “what comes next” but she can only even ask that question now that Salem got rid of Jacques, had Salem not targeted atlas he’d still be in charge,

As for the white fang, they haven’t actually progressed,

They stopped Adam and put ghira in charge again, basically resetting things back to how they where before sienna took over as in, the times Blake expressly told us weren’t working

Okay. I suppose this won't convince you of anything, but I'll take this one step at a time.

"True Weiss has tried to figure out “what comes next” but she can only even ask that question now that Salem got rid of Jacques, had Salem not targeted atlas he’d still be in charge."

Salem was going to target Atlas regardless, so that point is moot. Secondly, Ironwood already threatened Jacques that if he stepped out of line or got on his bad side he'd depose him in Volume 4. And to round things out, Salem's faction only gave Jacques enough rope to hang himself with given that his abusive behavior would've come to light eventually.

How do we know this? Willow planted cameras all over the mansion in case she ever needed to leave or bring things to the authorities, she only gets the courage to do so because WEISS came back and HELPED start the investigation AND also figured something was up.

The idea that Salem somehow helped things along is ridiculous, given that her motive and strategy is always divide and conquer WHICH WAS WORKING had Team RWBY not investigated into things further circa V7.

In short, Jacques already had plenty of enemies, Salem doesn't deserve any credit for his takedown, as he would've been brought down eventually.

~

"They stopped Adam and put Ghira in charge again, basically resetting things back to how they where before sienna took over as in, the times Blake expressly told us weren’t working."

As for the White Fang, yes they have progressed. They aren't at a "back to square one" situation just because Ghira took charge. Ghira himself says as much in V5, that Blake taught him the value of forgiveness with Illia and something that he should've realized regarding Sienna. Plus, Sienna and Ghira weren't enemies. Ghira even calls Sienna reasonable in V4 and respects that she's fighting for the Faunus, even if they disagree on methods.

Plus, the Faunus KNOW they cannot stay out of the literal fight for the world's sake otherwise things will stay stagnant and get WORSE for the Faunus. That's why they stopped Adam's militant group from literally ATTACKING ANOTHER SCHOOL.

You really think that letting Adam run rampant was going to change anything? That's letting a violent terrorist basically be the only face of resistance against oppression, and guess what? Normal people don't like that. There's propaganda at play when it comes to fighting oppression, sure, but there NEEDS to be a pushback when things go too far from within the movement before said extremism becomes its face.

Also, I'm sorry but where did Ghira say they were going to go back to square one? All they said was there was work to be done, and they all fought off Adam's White Fang when they tried to literally assassinate the Belladonna's and blow Haven up. Tell me, truly, how were either of those two actions Adam's faction took going to help Faunus at all?

Adam needed to be stopped before he further went rampant and tarnished people's legacies and names. Because when all you have is a violent extremist representing you, that's all people see. You need to have a variety of tactics and people to encourage betterness in society and people.

And standing on the sidelines wasn't working, clearly. Also, the reason why progress is slow on that front is because comms are still down. They stopped the White Fang and saved Haven from destruction, sure, but that's one Kingdom. There is work to be done across the world and that's going to take time.

Time they won't have if Salem isn't defeated.

~

And before you try me with the whole "Well, why didn't our heroes try anything against Ironwood or Atlas or Jacques?" Because:

They have no authority to make any moves. Blake has pull in the Faunus circles, sure, but outside Menagerie she's effectively nobody. With the communications still down, they can't effectively organize. Likewise, our heroes aren't in any position of power and don't have any real sway over people that Atlas or Mantle would recognize.

To add to the above, Weiss had her inheritence to the Schnee fortune and name stripped in V4. There goes any kind of pull over anyone in Atlas that they may recognize.

Also. People may not know Weiss has changed. They may still associate her with Jacques and her pompous attitude.

When our heroes DO have pull over people, they are refugees abandoned by Atlas who have nowhere to go now and require aid from the Faunus in the Crater. That's working alongside Robyn Hill's Happy Huntresses, who people are far more willing to hear out.

They barely got into Mantle before being arrested. They were forced into stealing an airship in V6 due to Cordo not listening to them. They stopped a whole pack of Sabyrs when they first came in, and got arrested afterward.

They need to work WITH Ironwood in order to figure out what to do about the oncoming threat of Salem. Had they refused, as Ironwood cleanly demonstrated at the end of V7, he can trump charges up and have them all placed under arrest as he attemped to black bag Robyn Hill too.

In the meantime, they do try to sway his opinion. They do push him away from martial law, they adamantly suggest working with Robyn Hill and the Happy Huntresses, and they're the ones that oust Jacques and get the evidence he's working with Watts.

Further, their plan actually works. It's only a stroke of bad luck in V8 that prevented everyone from evacuating safely and Ironwood's continued insistence on fascist bullshit.

To tie that back to point 1 as a final comment: Jacques is a businessman whom holds a lot of cards in Atlas. Taking him down isn't as simple as killing him, because then the assassin looks the part of the villain unless they bring proof of villainy to people that are willing to properly assess the evidence.

Which they did in V7.

Salem isn't an agent of change, she's a force of destruction and domination that seeks only the world's end. As people like @matrixdragon, @citadelofmythoughts, and others have said: our heroes have multitasked on this front, hence why they repeatedly tried brokering peace between Mantle and Atlas, stopping Adam's attack, etc.

Just because they are trying to focus on the literal end of the world doesn't mean they don't keep things like this in mind.

If they didn't, then maybe you'd be correct. But they did. So you're not.

Good day to you.

[tumblingxelian]

There's something to be said about Ghira (and to an extent, Kali) Belladonna's relatively understated character arc, when you factor in the Adam short.

When he first started things off, it was clear that, as well intended and as necessary as it was at first, that his pacifism was clearly becoming more of a hindrance than a help, especially when the White Fang was up against enemies who were willing to explicitly exterminate the Faunus, something that was rightfully (if not explicitly) implied with the transition from him to Sienna Khan.

At the same time however, it's clear that Ghira isn't lacking in perceptiveness, since he was willing to step down peacefully and allow the White Fang to transition to Sienna Khan, since it was clear that the White Fang needed a more suitable leader. This perceptiveness also arguably applies when it comes to Adam Taurus. Given that Adam was the one who started pushing Faunus towards using Grimm-styled masks, I wouldn't be surprised if, while partially motivated by his more peaceful aims, Ghira was frankly starting to get an uneasy feeling from the man, even if he didn't have the hard evidence to prove it.

At the same time however, even though he and Kali would end up on sour terms with Blake after she accused them of cowardice and left with the more radicalized White Fang, it would have been easy for him to stubbornly stick to the pacifism that caused him to lose his leadership in the first place. Yet, while not given much focus on, by Volume 5, he had clearly made some effort to change in a subtle fashion. He was far more willing to accept the idea of using violence in order to stop a rogue faction of the White Fang, and his ability to fight being portrayed during the assassination strikes me as something that he likely wouldn't have been as willing to do in the past.

I do think Blake being negatively influenced by Adam probably played a part in it, since much like how Blake felt awful after realizing how terrible Adam was and influenced her to believe her family was a bunch of cowards, Ghira probably took his daughter's words and behavior as a sign that, as well intended as his pacifism might have been, his inability to truly fight for social justice because of stubbornly sticking to pacifism nearly cost him his daughter to a dangerous demagogue, something he and Kali might have been able to avert if they had been more willing to accept that violence was a necessity to fight for their rights.

Mind you, this isn't to say that Sienna made things worse or anything like that, because it was pretty evident that, as much as they might have clashed on their ideals, they did respect each other. (How else would Ghira still be a respected leader of his people after all?) It's just that Sienna strikes me as someone like Blake, who did firmly believe that Adam was fighting for the same values as she and Ghira did (Faunus Rights), and I think her conversations with Adam show that she genuinely didn't realize the red flags coming off of him because it likely didn't occur to her that he didn't give a shit about Faunus rights, and because he was hiding his true nature until his bloodlust and ego got the better of him.

This is a solid post to be sure and I think it outlines things very smoothly and generally makes a lot of sense character wise so kudos there. 

I do definitely get some people’s critique that we’ve only seen Ghira willing to use violence against other Faunus. But that strikes me as more of a circumstances of the plot than anything else. 

But I digress, as we did see him acknowledge his respect for Sienna and acknowledging the flaws in his own leadership. Sadly we get less from Kali but it is what it is. 

Also yeah, one thing to always remember about Adam from the Adam Short is he worked hard to hide his true self from Sienna. 

He led the robbery alone. 

He stopped himself from killing that SDC guard when Sienna looked to him. 

He proclaimed his love for the Faunus and only smirked evily when Sienna wasn’t looking. 

This are all big signs Adam was both malevolent but also obscuring it from Sienna so she’d think he was loyal to the cause. 

[misstrashchan]

Since @im-the-king-of-the-ocean did a post about what TMA fear entities the RWBY characters are aligned/avatars of, I’ve been itching to do one myself because as a result of overlapping hyper fixations I think about this A LOT

The basic concept is that avatars in TMA become what they fear most or embrace a fear they have developed the most complex relationship with that plays into their motivations and drive as a character. What negative impulses they have to constantly fight themselves on, the shape of the monster that lives in their heart.

To quote the RWBY song Fear, “But our greatest fear will be realised, if we fall and lose ourselves to fear, we’ll become what we’ve feared all our lives” yeah that’s a very loose definition of what becoming an avatar is.

Since MAG s5 has proven that you can be an avatar of more than one fear, (Like Martin serving both the Eye and the Lonely) some of the RWBY characters might have more than one, but I’ll try to limit it to two to avoid getting complicated, but at the end of the day it’s all fear soup, we might categorise them according to Robert Smirke’s 14, but they all bleed into one another, like Gerard’s colour analogy in 111:

GERARD

I always think it helps to imagine them like colours. The edges bleed together, and you can talk about little differences: “oh, that’s indigo, that’s more lilac”, but they’re both purple. I mean, I guess there are technically infinite colours, but you group them together into a few big ones. A lot of it’s kind of arbitrary. I mean, why are navy blue and sky blue both called blue, when pink’s an entirely different colour from red? Y’know? I don’t know, that’s just how it works.

And like colours, some of these powers, they feed into or balance each other. Some really clash, and you just can’t put them together. I mean, you could see them all as just one thing, I guess, but it would be pretty much meaningless, y’know, like… like trying to describe a… shirt by talking about the concept of colour.

O-Of course, with these things it’s not a simple spectrum, y’know, it’s more like –

ARCHIVIST

An infinite amorphous blob of terror bleeding out in every direction at once.

GERARD

Now you’re getting it.

ARCHIVIST

Like colours, but if colours hated me. Got it. 

Ruby Rose: The End. The fear of death itself, uncaring and unstoppable. Man this was hard to think about but I have a lot of Big Feelings about this one. Initially I really, really wanted to give Ruby the Eye simply because “can laser beam monsters with their eyeballs once they become powerful enough” and there is a fascinating overlap in how the Beholding powers and Silver Eyes function in the same way, (especially in how Cinder being exposed to the Silver Eyes fills her with an overpowering fear and reopens old wounds from trauma that have never properly healed; which is VERY similar in the psychological affect Jon’s has on his victims when he Beholds them) they’re both direct enemies/opposites to the Dark that expose their enemies/victims true nature and destroying them in the process at times. Only one feeds on fear and the trauma of others while the other feeds off of hope and love (Gerard says there’s no such thing as an avatar of hope and love, clearly he’s never heard of Ruby). 

But nope! The fear and nature of the Beholding just doesn’t really match with Ruby at all. She isn’t driven by a need of knowledge, nor does she fear being watched, followed or having her secrets exposed. The End though? Death itself? Ruby outright states that’s her biggest fear in volume 5 to Oscar “It doesn’t matter if you’re standing in Salem’s way or not. She’ll kill anyone. And that, scares me most of all” to me Ruby’s fear of death itself is projected onto Salem here, I think. It’s uncaring, unstoppable, it doesn’t discriminate, and it could come for the people she cares about at any time. What matters though is the context she says this is in explaining her motives to Oscar. Her whole life has been shaped by her inability to process death, her relationship with grief, all starting with the tragic and abrupt death of her mother Summer as a child. She’s also surrounded by a lot of death motif too, the hooded cape, mostly wearing black, the giant grim reaper scythe. She’s the End. 

Of course, her being an Avatar of the End means having to imagine the worst version of Ruby, one that is fully consumed by that fear. Avatars of the End are not malicious or destructive in nature but instead are… very apathetic. They don’t need to seek out victims to feed off of, nor do they have a ritual, because the End comes for all. And that fits with what Ruby would be like if that fear fully consumed her. It’s more or less established in vol6 during the apathy arc when she tries so hard to fight against their influence and how horrified she is when everyone around her falls prey to it. Giving up, not caring, accepting the inevitable demise of everyone and yourself? Ruby was terrified of that. And when looking at the vol8 opening where we see Ruby being dragged down by what looks like the arms of the apathy? She fights the hardest against it because it’s what she’s most afraid of, but because of her inability to process her grief properly is ultimately what will make her the most vulnerable to it when she’s pushed to her limit. All Salem needs to do to break Ruby is to remind her of Summer’s death. Not even what actually happened to her or how she died, just the death itself. Hell, the first time we see Ruby in the Red trailer, she’s at her mother’s grave, the first verse in Red like Roses that’s about Ruby “Red like Roses fills my dreams and brings me to the place you rest” in which we come to understand that the “Red like roses” lyrics in both part one and two of the song is referring to Summer’s abrupt death which Ruby apparently dreams about, which brings to mind Oliver Banks, our most prominent Avatar of the End, whose first statement to The Magnus Institute in 011 (underneath the fake alias of “Antonio Blake”) is concerning how he started dreaming about the deaths of others, which he didn’t begin to take seriously- until it was his father that he saw in his dream. Upon which Oliver realised how terrifying death really was and that fear began to consume him. 

Okay I’ve probably gone off long enough about this but yeah. Ruby is the End. I mean, she also just got a song in the v7 soundtrack called Until the End 

Weiss Schnee: The Lonely. The fear of isolation, of being completely cut off and alone or disconnected from the rest of society. I don’t really have to go too deeply into this one. It’s pretty cut and dry. “The loneliest of all”? And the Schnees basically are the Lukas family. Actually thinking about it the Lukas’ are actually somewhat better? They were the only ones in the whole of TMA that understood to raise a child to be an heir/avatar of their fear they needed room to reject it or actively choose it, even if that had an 80% success rate. Both are still awful though. (Damn, I can’t believe Jaques is an actively worse parent than an eldritch fear avatar)

When Weiss comes back to Atlas in v4 she’s more aware of her loneliness than ever, feels more aware of how she and atlas high society as a whole is disconnected from the rest of the world and its struggles. Whitley commenting on her being in her room for months implies she’s purposefully been isolating herself during this time as well, in order to avoid her family members “A pleasure to see you out of your room for a change” (sidenote; the fact that whenever Whitley shows up it always catches Weiss off guard, like she didn’t even notice his presence until he wanted her too. That’s. That’s a BIG Lonely thing. Given Peter’s siblings eventually ran away and he was the only heir I can imagine Peter being what Whitley would end up like if no one intervenes)

I’d say they might also be an possibility of the Stranger due to her struggling to find her own identity and inability to recognise oneself, but that can be an aspect of the Lonely too, as we see when Martin is in a house that is a domain of the Lonely in s5, and is unable to recognise himself in the mirror or recall who he is.

What I do have to say about this is it’s pretty interesting considering at this point in the show Weiss’ relationship with loneliness is actually somewhat healthy and something she can use to relate to and help others. She understands other people’s loneliness, that Blake in v5 needed space and in time she’d come back, and Weiss would be ready to be there for her when she did. And she also understands Yang’s loneliness in the same volume and that she needed someone there to support her.

“But you’re right. I don’t know loneliness like you do. I have my own version. And I bet  Blake has her own version too.” 

Speaking of Blake…

 Blake Belladonna: The Stranger, I Do Not Know You. The fear that you cannot trust the perception of yourself or of others. The creeping sense that something isn’t right. I considered the Spiral, but the Stranger and the Spiral overlap more than any other two entities so I’m just gonna go with the Stranger. Especially with her semblance being a metaphor for disassociation, a coping mechanism for the abuse and gaslighting from her relationship with Adam being kind of the biggest thing here, since the Stranger and Spiral deal with that a lot. She literally creates false copies of herself, shadow clones which she uses to feint, distract and evade. As well as statues/mannequins when dust is involved, which the Stranger is known for manifesting. Her fighting style centres around misdirection, stealth and fooling people’s senses. She also used to be part of the White Fang, known within Sienna and Adam’s faction to wear the masks of monsters, appearing anonymous. And she literally disguises her identity as a Faunus in order to escape the White Fang and enroll at Beacon. Blake at first was hesitant to trust and rely on the others in the earlier volumes, to let her guard down, and when she finally did, the worst happened and her fears were proven right. In s2 Jonathan becomes more paranoid due to being marked and in close daily proximity to the Stranger (as Not-Sasha), much like how Blake in v2 becomes far more paranoid and less trusting of her team. She also does seek knowledge or answers even at the cost of her wellbeing, which is an Eye thing, but Blake’s desire for knowledge and answers isn’t really consistent or important enough with her character and motives beyond vol2 for me personally to consider her an Avatar of it, but I do think she is Eye aligned. 

Yang Xiao Long- The Eye. The Ceaseless Watcher, It Knows You, as well as The Hunt. For the Eye, the first time we see Yang is her trying to find information on her mother, and we see Raven in bird form at the beginning too, as she has followed Yang her whole life, never actually interacting or doing anything for her, just… watching her. We learn in vol2 that her search for answers surrounding her mother has been a part of her entire life, almost overwhelmingly so to the point where in her childhood she and Ruby nearly lost their lives to the Grimm when she decided to journey to a shack in the woods she thought would lead to clues in finding her mother. She is adamant because of that experience to never let her need for the truth and answers control her, but it is a need that is always there. When she finally meets Raven, she’s encouraged to “start questioning everything she knows” which, she does. Questioning and knowledge is a big part of Yang’s character, even now. She’s the one who questions Ozpin the most, as well as Raven herself, and in the recent volumes is the one who challenges and questions Ruby’s leadership the most. There’s also a moment in vol7 of her drawing parallels between herself and Robyn and relating to her when she says “I won’t stop until I find out the truth” Her being the one to take the relic of knowledge is hugely significant in this too, especially given the context that she acquires it right after confronting her mother, getting the answers she’s searched for her whole life, holding an artefact possessing infinite knowledge, and she sinks to her knees and cries because there is no sense of closure, that anything is better because of her knowing who and what her mother is, and that her choosing this path might have cost her ever having a relationship with Raven (which is more Raven’s fault of course, and Yang knows that, but that’s not how she’s feeling at that exact moment). 

For the Hunt, this one’s a bit simpler. The thrill seeker aspect to Yang’s character and motives in becoming a huntress and enjoying the chase and fighting in of itself. There’s another element in that as most Avatars of the Hunt start out as monster hunters who then develop the need to hunt and kill monsters, and gradually what qualifies as “monster” starts to blur more and more as they become consumed by the need and thrill of the chase and hunt itself. I bring this up because in vol3 Blake draws parallels between Yang and Adam after she is disqualified for attacking and injuring Mercury, worries with how familiar this all feels and that Yang might turn out the same as him (and just for the record Adam is a full blown Avatar of the Hunt, and the Slaughter too most like) 

 “I had someone very dear to me change. It wasn’t in an instant, it was gradual. Little choices that began to pile up. He told me not to worry. At first they were accidents, then it was self-defence. Before long, even I began to think he was right. This is all just… very familiar.” What Blake describes is… kind of similar to Basira’s relationship with Daisy with how Daisy, an Avatar of the Hunt, would justify to Basira and explain away how the violence and murders she committed as being for the greater good. 

Also just one more, because I have to

 Pyrrha Nikos: WebwebWEBWEB. Hoo boi Pyrrha is the Webbiest of Web Avatars as they come. Her whole character’s themes surrounding destiny, control and agency, feeling like her whole life had been decided for her, the fact she’d been blessed with incredible talents and opportunities meant she was supposed to be a huntress, the fact her talent as a world champion meant she was placed on a pedestal without her realising, becoming separate from the people who placed her there in the first place, that Ozpin and his inner circle tell her she has been chosen as the next Fall Maiden, but the method in which she must become so might result in the loss of her identity, that though they ultimately leave the choice to her do pressure and manipulate her into it. The idea of destiny being a predetermined fate you can’t escape is Pyrrha’s greatest fear, and rejects that idea in that she will not let her life be manipulated but will be the one to take control it instead, which is manifested in her having a semblance that she uses to subtly control and manipulate her surroundings. As Cinder puts it, “People assume she’s fated for victory when really she’s really taken fate into her own hands”.  

[polandspringz]

RWBY Actually Has Good Writing: A Thematic Analysis

I may be a stickler for desiring more Ozpin content, and occasionally I do feed into RWDE posting when I get caught up in some of the more negative opinions, but RWBY’s writing really isn’t as atrocious as people are making it out to be, and after Ozpin’s speech this volume, I thought about highlighting why. One of the key points in this is Ironwood’s character, as many people who defend him have said his character has been destroyed by the writing and people against his actions have said the opposite, that he’s always been an irredeemable dictator. This split also applies to those who side with Ozpin or Team RWBY, in the now overdone debates about whether Ozpin was justified in lying and so forth. Something that has really frustrated me is the ignorance people seem to be showing in regards to how characters are supposed to be characters, and are supposed to do bad things or make mistakes for the sake of the narrative. We all knew Ironwood was going to turn for the worse this volume, although we were happy to see him resist it for the majority of it. However, while he may be making horrible decisions that are jeopardizing the safety of the kingdom, does that make him inherently an evil character?

“But fear itself isn’t worthy of concern. Its is who we become while in its clutches. Will you be proud of that person? Will you forgive them? Will you understand why they felt the need to do the things they did? Will you even recognize them? Or will the person staring back at you be the very thing you should have feared from the start? I suppose we all find out, sooner or later.”

There is a difference between an antagonist and a villain. Ironwood is definitely not a villain, and the same goes for Ozpin. They don’t have evil motivations, they are not trying to completely destroy the world like Salem is. They have caused problems for the protagonists, yes, but they are not the villain of the series. Ironwood has only been the antagonist for this Atlas arc, like how Roman was for the first three volumes. The reason they have transformed into these roadblocks though, in the words of Ozpin, is because of fear, and this is something that RWBY has never failed to deliver on, and in fact has been building up this theme beautifully since its world-building in the first volume, because...

The Grimm are attracted to fear.  Plain and simple, that is one of the first concepts we are introduced to. The heroes fear failing in their respective paths, although that’s a constant fear in any story set in an action-adventure like this. Ironwood fears Salem like everyone else, but his fear also stems from more than just being annihilated or killed. His fear stems from a lack of power. We know this because of his speech to Oscar in the vault earlier in volume 7, how he felt small and powerless when Salem took control at the Vytal Festival, when the Queen piece was placed on his desk again, he snapped because he feared that he had already been usurped and lost the upper hand. He lost his leverage and power over Salem’s forces. Now, RWBY may be in a fantasy world, but because of its trope heavy nature, it is not a stretch to say that Ironwood’s fear of Salem having power over him could also be gender motivated.

I first thought about this in regards to Ernest Hemingway’s works. The Sun Also Rises, in particular, but any of his works have a similar theme of war and masculinity. In The Sun Also Rises, the main character is made impotent because of an injury in war, and the long and short of that is whole theme coming to fruition is that war is emasculating because there was no story-book manly victory in war. War is fearful and terrifying. Additionally, the main female character in the book is shaped by her masculine appearance (due to the trends at the time of the 20s) and her personality and lack of stereotypical femininity leaves no place for the men to need to behave stereotypically masculine, but with those two forces emasculating them, what are they left with to be men with?

It’s not nice to think that sexism exists in a fantasy world, but because RWBY by nature has always has such an emphasis on girlhood and women, from the main characters being a group of girls to the villain being a woman, it is very interesting to have a theme of sexism be so subtle. Because RWBY isn’t about sexism, if anything, it’s about women being able to carry on where men couldn’t, being able to move forward and be stronger then men in all different ways. If we look at Ironwood in this case, he is a man of war and military, but he is already in a way emasculated by his previous injuries, (although he may have the same strength with the robotic prosthetics, that did not happen overnight, that was still likely a shocking injury), and now with the other destroyed arm, he is weaker once more, at the most crucial time too. His allusion to the tinman though, of not having a heart and being stone cold, that removes typical features of femininity in an effort to be more mature and masculine. When Salem comes and he devolves into fear, he reverts to that coldness for more than the sake of allusion. He is doing it to find strength in the fear, but it is making him fall. But besides all of this, at his core, Ironwood is a military man, and stereotypically, men are in control in the military and government, women are not.

But what about Winter? Well, very simply, she is a subordinate to Ironwood. She doesn’t have power over him. What about Cordovin? She’s not a member of the military, but Ironwood still is of higher rank than her and she’s not a part of his arc. What I’m really getting at here is that there is an indication that part of Ironwood’s fear and desperation to fight Salem might be motivated by sexism and this fear of emasculation. His main motivation might be to stop her out of fear that she will destroy humanity, but subconsciously, there is more bothering him about that Queen symbol that the show doesn’t need to explore because it is crafted in there so perfectly that it doesn’t need an obvious scene of characters explicitly telling us this. The only person who was ever above Ironwood was Ozpin, another man, and while Ozpin can be said to have more feminine traits in his softer and more compassionate approach in volumes 1-3, he was still a man, so for Ironwood, it’s excusable.

So where does this leave us? Well, this sort of theme about gender in the show isn’t likely going away, as it is probably going to be how the Atlas arc closes. Ironwood is going to fail, and Team RWBY is going to have to pick up the pieces. We’ve seen this before in almost every dynamic between a female or a male character in the show. It happens even when Ozpin is exposed for lying. He is revealed to have messed up, he fails and hides away. Team RWBY keeps moving on though, they push on to Atlas with the relic despite Ozpin’s failure. Qrow keeps stumbling through life, falling back into depression and alcoholism, but Ruby and Yang just push past it and keep going, they do not let it drag them down. When Raven left, Taiyang was hurt, but Summer entered the picture and helped him, and then when Summer left, Taiyang was so broken, and it was up to Yang to pick up the pieces and raise Ruby. This isn’t to say the girls in this show are fixing the men, but rather they are stronger and more able to fix what the men could not.

There are some interesting cases though where we see more of this divide between the men and the women in terms of their power and ability to control the situation though. With Adam especially, he was unable to move on from Blake and chased after her. Blake was able to move on for a while, but Adam was the one dragging her down (with fear). She was able to free herself with the help of the other female characters in the show. The White Fang had good leadership under Sienna, but when Adam killed her and took over, he failed and the organization continued to collapse, now Blake and Illia are picking up the pieces and pushing forward. Even with Salem, Ozma’s failure was dying to a simple illness. She perhaps could have learned to move on if the Gods hadn’t granted her immortality and cursed her. She had no power over them even when she tried to attack them with her magic the first time. They made the decision to punish her in that way, to knock her down because she tried to hold power over them, but that caused her to move forward in a different direction (maybe not necessarily towards the light/good, but she kept moving forward while the Gods abandoned the planet).

To finish up though, I wanted to touch upon Oscar, Ren, and Jaune because now we have the question- well why haven’t they failed? Well, they have, and the women of the show have moved past their failures too, but they are characters with more feminine traits, which is what gives them power over the men in the show like Ironwood and Qrow who continue to stumble and fall. Jaune and Pyrrha- Jaune’s failures are the entirety of the Beacon arc, his semblance issues, his lack of combat training, Pyrrha does try and help him, and their bond in a way does contribute to Pyrrha’s death in the narrative, plus it leaves an impact on Jaune as one of his failures. However, he’s managed to get stronger since then, but he’s not the main character, Ruby is. And as such, during much of Volume 4 Ruby was the real leader of the group and Jaune did not mind it. Ren’s closed off nature is being more explored currently and will continue to be explored in the coming volume it seems, but we’ve seen how he’s damaged his bonds with Nora because he’s trying not to fall. He is viewing his closeness to Nora and sensitivity as a weakness, which is why he falls when he bottles it up and cries when Neo disguises herself as Nora. He needs to learn to accept that part of himself to stop himself from falling. And in Oscar’s case, he is tied to Ozpin, so starting with what happened with Jinn and everyone turning their back on him is a part o Ozpin’s failure, not really his.  However, there were a few posts discussing how Ruby was somewhat of Oscar’s mentor in Ozpin’s absence, and that has had an effect on Oscar character too. But, even if Oscar learns how to not fail and not give in to fear, he is not the main character, so he will likely still stumble and will not be the one to get the final hit in, because Ruby is the protagonist. That isn’t to say his character won’t be reconciled, it will be. His arc will be completed and he won’t stumble when the time comes to defeat Salem, but he won’t be able to do it alone, because the show’s themes and its direction hinges on having our hero be the one to do that. And the hero is Ruby and she’s a girl with the most iconic, simplest depictions of femininity in her willingness to embrace her emotions and her strength to keep moving forward where the men fall to their knees. 

[inflammatoryfandomblog]

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. 

[tonotbelionized]

Redemption in RWBY

Redemption: the act of atoning for a past fault or mistake. There’ve been numerous redemption arc in media, some very well written and others less so, and RWBY is no different. 

Over the years the FNDM had discussed over which characters should or should not be redeemed, though others agreeing with their choices being very polarizing. Some of the characters I’ve seen people wanted to be redeemed are Adam, Cinder, Hazel, Emerald, Mercury and Ilia. Due to her having the only redemption arc out of the villains so far, I will be mostly talking about Ilia.

A redemption arc can either be done really well or really bad depending on the writers, with one in particular being heralded as one of the best redemption stories in modern media; Zuko’s arc in Avatar the Last Airbender. So, what makes a good arc and where does RWBY’s come into play?

Redemption can work for many characters, but there’s some things that need to be hit in order for the arc overall to work. Mostly they’re:

(1) Make sure the character is willing to work towards atonement.

It’s easy to have other characters try to excuse the villain and do most of the work to redeem them, but it falls flat when the villain is mostly unapologetic until one talk and then they’re all better. A good redemption arc is a long and hard journey, and the villain will have to face opposition despite their desire to atone.

With the one redemption we have in RWBY so far; Ilia, this point is somewhat done right? Ilia does realise ultimately on her own that the White Fang isn’t this revolutionary rights movement anymore now that it’s under Adam and Sienna, but it still happened right at the end when not five minutes earlier, she was willing to join in the attack to kill the Belladonna family and send Blake back to her abuser.

Just because Ilia felt conflicted over doing so does not erase the fact that she willingly went along with it anyway. I would’ve preferred if Ilia had started moving away sooner from the White Fang, but time restraints and the volume itself was already split between multiple story lines that it just wasn’t possible. 

That being said, Ilia turns on Corsac and stops the fight, ultimately helping the Belladonna’s. It might not be as much as I want, but it’s something at least.

(2) Have the character face opposition during their arc.

Redemption falls flat when the character in question is just accepted back with no opposition. Even if they realise that what they did was wrong and wanted to atone for it, that doesn’t mean that the people they’ve wronged should accept them back with no complaint. Sometimes people don’t accept those who’ve hurt them, and that’s acceptable because they’re not obliged to. 

It’s the one problem that I have with Ilia’s arc. I love her, and I love her arc overall, but it was somewhat jarring that everyone accepted her into the fold just because she stopped Corsac at the end of the fight. The theme of forgiveness is nice and I enjoyed listening to Ghira pointing out that Blake could do what he couldn’t at her age, but there was little work that Ilia had to do between her and Blake’s talk in the burning house and her being accepted into Blake and Sun’s friendship group.

It feels like it ignores that before that Ilia was a willing part of the assassination attempt on Ghira and Kali, tried to kidnap Blake to send her back to Adam, constantly tried to undermine their work getting the Faunus to help Haven, and even nearly killed Sun. Don’t get me wrong, it’s pretty much in Sun’s character to let bygones be bygones, but it’s jarring that the only person who points out what Ilia did was the guard, who was promptly shut down by Ghira and Blake. 

At least her helping at the battle of Haven improves her case, and makes her redemption more authentic, but it just feels that because she was conflicted before attacking the Belladonna house it means that she can be accepted back with no questions. I’m not a fan.

So what about Adam and Cinder? 

Well, I don’t think they can be redeemed, and in Adam’s case definately not given that he’s dead. Neither of them showed any remorse or even question their actions, they did what they did with the idea that they’re in the right for behaving so or simply didn’t care about the people they’re hurting. 

It also doesn’t help that they’ve killed people that the cast and the audience are close to. Cinder shows no remorse over killing Ozpin or Pyrrha, and was amused by the destruction of Beacon and the deaths of many innocent people. Adam dismembered Yang and tried to kill both her and Blake in Argus, as well as showing that he’s not above using Yang’s PTSD against her. 

Neither are going to be redeemed in my opinion, and they don’t deserve to either. No one deserves redemption and neither of them have put in any work towards it. That doesn’t mean you can’t have AUs where either of these characters do atone for their mistakes, I love them myself, but I wouldn’t expect it to happen in canon to be honest.

There are characters who I believe will be redeemed. Emerald and Mercury.

Both have sympathetic backstories that explain their motives, as well as their dependency on Cinder. Emerald saw Cinder as the maternal figure she never had, and is willing to deal with her abusive nature because she has no one else, and Mercury stays because he’s never known a life outside of killing and hurting people and show hesitation in leaving that behind; something that Tyrian points out in Volume 6.

While these aren’t necessarily the basis for redemption, as evident by Adam’s dark past of being enslaved in the SDC, these pasts do paint these teenagers in a more sympathetic light.

The main positive that points towards their redemption is that Emerald shows remorse and is conflicted over what she’s doing while in Cinder’s group. She’s saddened by the sight of people dying in the Fall of Beacon, she confesses to Mercury that without Cinder, she’s unsure that what she’s doing is right. Similar to Ilia, she’s clearly shown to not be doing this out of a selfish goal of wanting power or wanting to hurt someone close to her, she’s simply a young woman who has nothing else in her life and so attached to the one source of comfort she had found.

It’s just unfortunately for Emerald, that person was Cinder.

The same can be said for Mercury. While he isn’t the type to openly show doubt or emotion like Emerald, the story points out that he’s just as lost and confused as she is, only hiding it under a sense of smugness and lack of care for what’s right. Tyrian telling him the truth in Volume 6 simply points out what everyone ws thinking and gives Mercury just as much chance of leaving Salem and the villains as Emerald.

Hopefully we see more of this in Volume 7, and I hope that the few mistakes that they did make in Ilia’s arc is fixed with Emerald and Mercury. Either way, I am overall happy with the writing with this theme in RWBY, and look forward to what we get next. Thanks for reading!

[hollyoaksloversx]

Spreading Hatred...

Rounding up a week in Hollyoaks (11th-15th March 2019)

This week was perhaps one of the most uncomfortable weeks of Hollyoaks I’ve sat through, as Ste Hay’s far right extremism story took centre stage. It was also incredibly compelling to watch and the terrible news coming out of New Zealand this weekend, proves that Hollyoaks are right to bring this issue to the public’s attention. At the start of the week, Imran was still giving himself a hard time for attacking Ste, and Tony decided it was his duty to tell the Maalik’s the truth, resulting in Ste punching Sami and being suspended from the tea house when new boss, Stuart, witnessed the fight. With Ste furiously stomping around the flat, Peri decided that his feud with the Maalik’s had gone far enough and invited them round for dinner that evening. Ste was initially completely against the idea, however, he was given food for thought when Peri pointed out that he had been just as bad as Imran at one point, but people had been good enough to give him a second chance and he reluctantly agreed to attend. Unfortunately, Ste had a bad day when Stuart informed him that he’d lost his job indefinitely and he threw the Maalik’s out when he returned home to find them sitting round the table.

The following morning, Peri presented Ste with an unpaid bill and demanded to know what he was going to do about it. Ste continued to blame the Maalik’s for his current predicament, and he said as much to Leah when she walked into the room, telling her that he would have to cancel their holiday as a result. Later, at school, Leah cornered Imran in the corridor and blamed him for her family’s problems. Leah was stopped in her tracks as she grabbed hold of Imran and went to punch him, and Ste and Sami were quickly called into school to discuss the altercation. As Ste ranted and raved about Imran ‘targeting’ Leah, he was stopped in his tracks when Laurie revealed that Leah had been the instigator, and told Ste to get a grip of himself. With no job, and now having to deal with his daughter being drawn into the conflict, a devastated Ste returned to the village, and was seen eyeing up Sami’s car whilst holding a screw driver. He was stopped from damaging the vehicle by Jonny, who took Ste back to the flat and suggested he move in. Although Ste was delighted by the new arrangement, the same couldn’t be said for Peri, who was left feeling deeply uncomfortable by a comment Jonny made about Muslims...

Although Ste appeared unfazed by the comment, Peri wasn’t willing to let it go, and demanded that Ste have a word with Jonny. Jonny feigned horror over the situation and managed to convince Ste that there had been no malice in his words. Keen to keep Ste onside, Jonny convinced Stuart to give Ste his job back, and the pair invited Ste and Lucas to attend a football match with them and some of their mates. However, it soon became apparent that these were not people Ste should be mixing with as, whilst Stuart kept Ste talking inside, telling him that he would always be welcome with them, Jonny and co beat a man outside in a racially motivated attack. With no knowledge of what had occurred, Ste spent the rest of the day with the group, and was delighted by how well they all seemed to get on and how accepting they were of his sexuality and past addictions. However, the following day, DS Yates turned up at the tea house to investigate the attack, and questioned Ste over whether or not any of his group had left the pub at any point. Despite knowing that they had, Ste covered for Jonny. Whilst Jonny may have been able to win Ste round easily, he was having a far harder time with Peri, who was left suspicious when she walked in on Stuart and Jonny in cahoots. Needing to think of an excuse quickly, Jonny made Peri feel uncomfortable when he told her that he had a crush on her, and had simply been asking Stuart for advice.

Meanwhile, as Ste spent time with his new friends, Aunty Kameela was holding a dinner party for the Maalik’s, minus Misbah, who was away on a course. Kameela quickly found herself at loggerheads with Sami when she invited Liberty to the meal without his knowledge and the pair butted heads again later over their differing ideas over what it means to be a Muslim in 21st century Britain. Fantastic scenes, which juxtaposed perfectly with Ste being sucked further and further into the grasp of the extremists.

Elsewhere this week, there was trouble in paradise for Sally and Myra as Sally was once again left questioning Myra’s commitment to her, especially when Myra didn’t correct the priest when he assumed she was marrying a man. Sally was further crushed when Nana left one of Myra’s old wedding scrapbooks lying around and she realised it was full of pictures of men. In order to get Myra excited about marrying Sally again, Nana took her for a night out at the Duke Street Social, where Myra ended up having a snog with the DJ, as witnessed by Scott. Scott confronted a guilty Myra over her actions a couple of days later, and Myra promised Scott she would come clean. However, she couldn’t bring herself to do so and instead, threw herself into planning her wedding to Sally.

In other news this week, with Harry and James back from their holiday, Mac began piling the pressure on Breda to kill James before the court case. There was relief all round when Maxine’s test results showed that there was nothing wrong with her whilst we finally saw a human side to Liam as he spent time with baby Iona. Finally, Harley decided to leave the village and was touched when Tom gifted her some money to put towards her dream of working with Orangoutangs. 

5 Things We Learned This Week:

1. There are many ways to leave Hollyoaks. You can die in an unusual manner, such as being stabbed by a samurai sword like Callum Kane, or you can sail off on a barge with Cat Deeley like Rory ‘Finn’ Finnegan. This week saw Harley bid farewell as she left to ‘save the orangoutangs’. Ten points for originality, Hollyoaks!

2. Always look for the man in drag when about to cheat on your partner. Yes, it could be a beautiful woman sat at the bar, but it could also be one of your neighbours, who just happens to have a voice that can be heard from space. 

3. Leah Barnes would make the perfect case study in the ‘nature vs nurture’ debate. She may not be Ste’s biological daughter, but she was certainly channeling him this week as she gave Imran what for. Let’s just hope that’s as far as the similarities go. I don’t want to see Leah don a tracksuit any time soon. 

4. Peri Lomax is all kinds of amazing right now. I loved her calling Ste out on his treatment of the Maaliks, especially when she reminded him of all the terrible things he got up to in his youth. It sometimes feels that the show itself forgets that Ste used to be a hateful little shit so it was great to see the characters actually acknowledge it. 

5. Tony is most definitely not a homophobe. He’s got a gay son and a rainbow flag in his restaurant window to prove it!

Characters Featured:

Aunty Kameela, Breda, Damon, Donna-Marie, DS Yates, Goldie, Grace, Harley, Harry, Imran, Iona, James, Jesse, Joel, Jonny, Juliet, Laurie, Leah, Liam, Liberty, Lucas, Mac, Maxine, Mercedes, Misbah, Myra, Nana McQueen, Peri, Romeo, Sally, Sami, Scott, Sienna, Ste, Stuart, Sylver, Tom, Tony and Yasmine. 

Past Characters Mentioned:

Amy Barnes, Nico Blake, Maggie Kinsella, Neeta Kaur and Tegan Lomax. 

[calliecat93]

RWBY V6 CH5 Review: The Coming Storm

It's been roughly about a month now since Volume 6 started... and ho boy, has this volume has not held back it's punches whatsoever. Within the span of four chapters we got a train wreck, long awaited questions answered, Cinder plotting her vengeance, and Salem reminding us why she is scary as Hell. We've been put through the wringer these past for weeks, and now with Chapter 5 upon us, we are all wondering how this can get anymore intense. Well delving into the horror genre seems to be a pretty good way! What do I mean? Well lets find out!

Overview

Before we check on our heroes though, lets check in on Cinder The good news for her is that Lil' Miss Malachite has gotten the information that she wanted. She informs the Fall Maiden of the good guys heading for Argus, which causes Cinder to conclude that they're heading for Atlas next. She starts to head off... until Lil' Miss refers to her by name. As it turns out, Cinder was quite the interesting figure. So much so that it brought the information broker double the business. How you may ask? Well the camera cuts to above where we see a figure standing on a  beam... and carrying with her a familiar looking parasol That's right my friends, after three volumes and a ton of teasing, Neo has made her return.

Neo wastes no time, attacking Cinder and the two villainesses begin to rumble. It's a pretty awesome hand-to-hand fight too, all as a chilling new Jeff and Casey tune plays. Did I mention that I really want the soundtrack? Between this, Lionized, Miracle, and the opening this soundtrack is gong to be morbidly awesome. Lil' Miss, while clearly enjoying the show, eventually tells the two girls to take their rumble outside. It's at this point that Cinder discovers that the Neo that she's been fighting is one of her illusions... so yeah, Neo can now cast longer, more lifelike illusions. Be afraid people. Be very afraid. But it isn't long before Cinder causes the real Neo to step forward.

Now normally, Neo has a confident, pretty cocky demeanor like her former boss, which her previous illusion also demonstrated. But here? Her clothes are slightly tattered, her expression is serious and vengeful, and most notably she is now wearing a very familiar looking hat. It takes Cinder no time to realize what the deal is: Neo wants to kill her as revenge for Torchwick's death. As they fight however, Cinder points out that they both have the same goal, which is to get revenge on Little Red Ruby. Cinder finally goes into Maiden mode, causing Neo to stop in fear, ad the Fall Maiden convinces her to knock it off and that they can work together to make Ruby pay. Neo agrees to talk... well she can't really talk, which I guess we now have conformation that Neo is indeed a mute. But you get what I mean.

Back with Team RWBY, the storm is growing worst as Ruby is confused by the state of Brunswick Farms. Most places that she's seen that were abandoned were either destroyed or unfinished, but this place is fine. The group breaks into what I assume is the mayor's house and everyone scatters to look around and find supplies. Ruby's attention goes to some portraits, showing a rather happy bunch of people. Blake goes to check on her... when the two hear Weiss scream. The gang goes to find her and Yang in a state of horror... because they just found the corpses of the home owners still int heir beds. WELL... THAT WAS SOMETHING.

A little later, Qrow confirms that all of the town is dead int he same manner. Weiss understandably doesn't want to stay there, but with the storm they have no choice. Qrow goes to see if he can find anything that can transport them out, ordering the others to go nowhere alone. Blake and Yang go to see if they can find anything in the other buildings as Ruby and Weiss look around to see if they can find any food. That leaves Oscar with Maria, who tells him to keep the fire going as she looks for a bedtime story. Did I mention that I love Abuelita Maria? Because Dear God do I love her.

Blake and Yang end up in some kind of barn/shed and look around, also wondering what it could have been that killed everyone. It's pretty clear that Yang is not handling any of the recent events well and Blake is concerned, but the blonde merely says that she's tired and wants to get out of this place. She finds a wagon that looks large enough to hold everyone, but any possible relief is killed when she has a flashback to Adam. She tells Blake of how she still flashes back to that night, her hand trembling as she asks the cat girl if she believes that Adam is still out there. Blake doesn't know, especially since despite knowing that the WF will reject him for his cowardice, he'll likely force his way anyways. She would know after all, he would use force and fear to make her feel beneath him and right into his control. But still, Blake tries to comfort Yang by assuring her that she isn't going anywhere and will be there for her. It seems to help Yang... until Blake says that if Adam comes back, she'll protect her. Yang doesn't take that comment well, heading back while saying that they'll hook the wagon to Bumblebee later. And somewhere, the Bumblebee shippers aren't sure if they should cheer, cry, or both.

Back with Ruby and Weiss, they find what looks like a bar. Ruby isn't happy with this, especially considering Qrow's current mental state, but brushes it aside as she heads for a pantry. Weiss however starts to ask Ruby if they're still heading for Atlas, much to Ruby's confusion. Weiss brings up that Salem can't be killed, so what's the point of going there now? Well that's what she claims anyways. I think that we all know the real reason why she doesn't want to go back. Ruby is clearly upset about this, but Weiss takes it back and just says that she's tired and hates this place... remember this for the review. They find more alcohol and a chained up wine cellar... and some canned shrimp flavored beans! Ugh... why would anyone make those? They take the food and leave and the episode ends with one of the cellar doors opening up...

Review

If anyone was hoping that things would get more cheery.. well sorry, you're going to be waiting awhile! Man, this episode was tense. Heck,t hat's what they should have named it! Tense: The Episode. I'm not complaining though cause man, this chapter was great! The drama continues to keep us at the edge of our sets, we got some payoffs, and plenty of nightmare fuel! Thanks for the Day 5/Until Dawn crossover CRWBY! I'll be having nightmares for weeks now!

So lets talk about the villains first! Neo is back... and I really don't care. I know that Neo is a fan favorite, and it totally baffles me as to why. Her design is cute and all, but... she hasn't done anything. I mean she's.. what? Fought Yang, broke Roman out of prison, and fought Ruby before getting Mary Poppins'd off the airship. That's it. We know nothing about her as a character and her scenes are very minor. She existed to be Roman's flunky because Monty came up with a cool design at the last possible moment. Otherwise, she could have been written out and it would have changed nothing about the series. I need more than a cool character design to care about a character, hence why I wasn't upset when Sienna got killed off, so I really wasn't all that excited to have her show up again,

That being said... this CAN turn out to be a good thing. Because with Torchwick dead, it gives Neo motivation as a character. She clearly cared about her boss and now that he's gone, all that she's left with is the desire for revenge against those who got him killed in the first place. With Cinder now wanted, it made sense to go after her first, plus it was Cinder's planning that got Torchwick put into that situation to begin with. Honestly Torchwick's death may be what allows Neo to get the character that I feel that she is lacking and while I don't expect her partnership with Cinder to stick for long, it'll be interesting to see how she operates now that she has the chance to get back at Ruby.

As for the scene itself, I loved it! The fight scene was great. Fast-paced, but not over bloated. Just a really cool hand-to-hand fight with both Cinder and Neo using their abilities to their advantage. Cinder is still a bitch, but she's showing more of the more smug persona that we're familiar with while actually being logical with her convincing Neo to work with her rather than against her. Considering her current situation and lack of any backup until she redeems herself, it makes sense for Cinder to go this route, even if her mind is still mainly on making Ruby suffer. But hey, she's not screwing up any per-conceived plans to do it this time! Oh, and Lil' Miss Malachite continues to be a delight. I freakin' love this woman.

Now onto our heroes... and boy do I worry for them. God the entire sequence from them breaking into the house to finding the bodies... it was tense. Something felt so off. Poor Weiss just seems traumatized after, and I can't blame her. I'd be traumatized too. So what was it that killed an entire town? Well I think it's pretty clearly a Grimm, but we'll go more into that in a little bit. For now, lets talk about the partner scenes.

Yang and Blake's scene just... made me sad. On the one hand, I freakin' love Blank. She's gone form my least favorite Team RWBY member and not even in my Top 5 to now being a serious contender for my second favorite alongside Weiss. Throughout this chapter, she is supportive and concerned for her teammates. She goes to see what Ruby's thinking about as she stares at the photos, gives Weiss a blanket while she's clearly still reeling from her morbid discovery, and she is trying so hard to be supportive and friendly with Yang. She tries to give Yang the chance to talk about what's bothering her, opens up about how small Adam made her feel, and tries to assure Yang that she's not going anywhere and won't let her get hurt again. It really shows how much that Blake has grown since Volume 4, an I am loving every second of it.

Sadly, Yang isn't doing that great. The recent events, from Adam to everything with her mom to the new revelations to now, have clearly weighed her down. She's downcast, bitter, and frustrated. Her PTSD is still haunting her as she still has flashback and despite being willing to face her fears, those fears still haunt her. And sadly just when it looks like Blake's making a breakthrough, Yang gets upset because Blake said that she'd protect her. It's a very sweet comment, but to Yang it make her feel like she's weak an incapable. She's supposed to be the one protecting people, not the other way around. She hates feeling weak and afraid, so while Blake's comment was nothing but well intentioned, to the blonde it felt like an insult and only reinforced all the negativity brewing inside her. Clearly she needs to let it out and she and Blake need to sort everything out, then she can start to do better. Hopefully, this arc will allow that.

Onto the Ruby and Weiss pair and... man, poor Weiss. The girl is badly shaken from finding the corpses, even as she tries to keep some kind of positive attitude after. But it's clear that both the recent events and the fear of going back to Atlas are haunting her. She's afraid to go home since it means facing her father again and the threat of once more being locked away. No one would want to go back to the place where thy were kept prisoner. But she's also concerned with the recent revelations. Salem can't be killed. Even if they lock away the Relic, all it'll do is slow her down. There seems to be no point, and Weiss is considering calling it quits even if only briefly. It shows how bad of a state shes in emotionally on top of everything else, and I really worry for her.

Then of course there's Ruby. I think that this is the most serious that we've seen her in a good while. She's very much in leader mode, and after how baldy she got the shaft last volume, this is very good to see. She's concerned about the state of the town and trying to piece it together. She tries to comfort Weiss by looking for food. When she finds the bar, she want sot immediately seal it up out of concern that Qrow will get overly drunk. Clearly a lot is weighing on Ruby, yet she still displays a helpful, positive attitude. She's really trying, and it really makes me concerned for her. IDK if all that she's holding in is going to break in this volume, but with how the other three seem ready to break, this might be the right time to do it. I do think that Ruby may have to save them all though, if my current theory about the Grimm is right.

So you may remember that both Weiss and Yang being tired, Yang even showing signs of being delirious. I don't think that's just general dialogue. Remember, they were the two who found the bodies. Bodies that were tucked in bed alongside the rest of the town. It seems that whatever the Grimm is, one that I assume the town locked up until now, it killed them in their sleep There are many different ways to interpret this, but my current thought is that this is some kind of dream walker Grimm. Think of it like Freddy Kruger form Nightmare on Elm Street. Someone who haunts and tortures you in your dreams, to the point that you end up dead in the real world. And this Grimm may cause people to feel tired in order to lull them into it' trap, hence why the entire town ended up dead.

If I had to guess, Weiss, Yang, and Qrow are going to end up asleep and end up victims of the Grimm. Maybe Blake too, but who can say? IDK about Oscar either though I think that Maria will be fine. This will probably means that while everyone is trying to fight through their nightmares. Ruby may have to go into the cellar to find and kill the Grimm, which would lead to the scene in the opening. Heck, for all I know all of them will end up in the nightmares and maybe Ruby's the first to break through or something. I'm not sure. For all I know, I'm talking completely out of my ass. What I do know however is no matter what this Grimm may be or whatever is coming next, with this episode's title being 'The Coming Storm' it's NOT gonna be pretty.

Final Thoughts

Like last week, this episode had me uncomfortable throughout, but in different ways. I am seriously worried about everyone and whatever it is that's about to happen to them. No one is in a good place right now, and that's probably about to reach a breaking point. But hey, we got a cool fight scene and a new song! That was nice of them! But yeah, really enjoyed this episode! It has plenty of character development and plenty of setup for next week. So tune in then as Nightmare Fuel Theater proudly presents RWBY: Day 5 Until Dawn!

[5thinvictus]

A Fan Review of Stan Lee’s Lucky Man

or ... A Gift That Should Have Never Been Given

I’ve had a ton of fun promoting this terrible show and now that it’s over, I thought I’ve give a quick review on what I thought of it overall. 

So, TL;DR:  Overall Score: D+

Character Consistency: C-

Narrative Strength: F

Acting: B

Re-watchability: Minimal.

For some reason, people think that if a show/movie is based on a comic book, that excuses it from the same scrutiny that other fictional works receive.  Sorry, but this is actually very far from the case.  In fact, comic readers are often used to dramatically higher standards for plot, narrative, character development than most of the subpar movies and TV shows that find their way into production these days.

In Short: Lucky Man, just because you were based on a comic, does not excuse you from the most basic plot holes which abounded within your meagerly meandering narrative.

Click below for my detailed review:

The Good:

Elizabeth Gray (Neve McIntosh):

I enjoyed this actress and her character’s arc.  At first, you’re not sure what to make of her, but she proves that she’s a human being and not just a caricature of a strong female or a beautiful female.  She makes mistakes and then she seeks to correct them.  I liked this character a lot.  She grew and it was consistent and believable.

Samuel Blake (Rupert Penry-Jones):

No, I’m not biased.  Rupert is an exceptional actor, otherwise he wouldn’t be one of my favorites and this role was no different.  Regardless of how terrible the writing was, he was splendid.  Charismatic and likeably sinister.  I started to root for the bad guy at some point mid-season, and no, not just because he’s Rupert (I never rooted for Clive reader ... not even once.  He was such a asshole.)

His sudden reversal in the last episode was more than disappointing though.  They’d set up the villain to be very, very principled.  In fact, that was his most important quality and then, in the final episode, they completely reversed that?  In the end though, Samuel Blake was one of the best things in this season.

The Cinematography:

The angles.  The shots.  The lighting.  The costumes.  They were all lovely.  Consistently so.  I enjoyed how good Lucky Man looked.  The crew is phenomenal.  They should have taken the writers’ salaries and divided it up to the cast & crew.  They deserved ALL of the success of Lucky Man.

The Locations:

They really made London look incredible, but something has been bothering me quite a bit.  Did they really need to fly to Hong Kong to film?  There were very few shots that even gave hints that they were there and honestly, they could have cgi’d in most of that stuff.  Clearly they were more focused on having fun filming than actually making a good show.

The Bad:

Suri Chohan (Amara Karan):

Good lord, this character was a brick.  I felt nothing for her and I usually relate quite a bit to spunky, nerdy little sidekicks.  She was dumb at every corner.  Everyone got the drop on her.  She was hyper emotional.  She tried to sleep with the tall detective ... randomly.

I’m sorry, but she didn’t seem like a real person at all to me.  She was a caricature of some ideal Mary Sue.  Everyone loves Chohan.  Chohan is morally and ethically perfect.  Yeah ... no.  I’ve better things to do than watch a character I cannot relate to in any way, shape, or form.

Harry Clayton (James Nesbitt):

James Nesbitt is an incredible actor, but Harry Clayton was such a miserable character that I didn’t care if he lived or died.  He killed so many people.  He was overly arrogant.  I didn’t care about this character at all.  In the later part of the season, I started to fast forward through most of his scenes.

The Narrative:

This was by far the worst aspect of the show.  Nothing ever really made sense.  Nothing.  It was a strange combination of scenes people wanted to shoot coupled together loosely with vague reasons and meandering dialogue and unbelievable character motivations.

The What-The-Fuck:

Eve Alexandri (Sienna Guillory):

I totally understand being pissed at Harry because he let you die.  I totally get that angle and they could have used that beautifully.  They could have built a narrative around her that reinforced her falling for Blake, but they didn’t.  They didn’t even bother.

She’d been brought up to protect the bracelets and it took Blake less than a day to tear her down?  Absolute bullshit.

Blake kidnaps her, after she said she would listen to him, and throws her off a bridge (which she nearly dies from), and she forgives him and not Harry?  Absolute bullshit.

So, she will forgive an hot stranger from trying to kill her, but she won’t forgive her best friend who did so to save another life?  Absolute bullshit.

And then, in a matter of days (or weeks?), Blake has turned her into a ruthless killer and she convinces him to kill his entire family in front of her?  Yeah, what?

She has no principles.  No loyalties.  No ethics.  She has a poorly fabricated fight with Harry and then runs to Blake.  After one fight.  One.  She can be turned away from her entire life’s goal because Blake winks at her?  And then, in the end, Blake says ONE mean thing to her and she tries to kill him.  And then, in the end, she turns on Blake suddenly.  “OH NO!  NOT THAT MUCH INNOCENT BLOOD!”

Absolute bullshit.

What a miserable and unbelievable character.

A scantly clad Samuel Blake:

Ok ok ok.  Yeah, this is absolutely a “what-the-fuck” topic.  As much as I enjoyed seeing him shirtless (and pants-less) ... over and over and over again, it was absolutely pointless and shouldn’t have been in the show.  EVEN THOUGH I FUCKING LOVED IT: That whole ... “I’m gonna walk through the morgue naked.” scene was unnecessary and it really did detract from the story.  Why didn’t he just take the doctor’s clothes?  Seriously.  He was heading out to meet Eve and he just happens across some pants ... he would have taken the Pathologist’s pants.  Anyone who argues otherwise is an idiot.

This was such blatant fan baiting / fan service.

A side rant here: As a fan of RPJ, this nudity really should have been fun, but the hardest part of it was the fact that there’s a small but very vocal minority of Rupert’s fan base which consider themselves his Morality Police.  It’s really just a handful of people using multiple accounts to fabricate dialogue, in an attempt to shame him (mind you, by directly tagging him on Twitter), on an almost daily basis, over his body.  They also shame fans for appreciating his body and no one better find him sexually attractive or you will be targeted.

Plot Holes:

I’m just gonna go over the holes in 3x08.  There are holes in EVERY episode, but I’ll focus on the last one because I want to push everything about this show out of my mind now.

Wasn’t Blake a drug addict?

At some point, I’m convinced the writers changed and they completely forgot about the most fundamental flaw that we’ve been given about Samuel.

In the last two episodes, that was just gone.  Since it was such an important aspect that they were setting up in the beginning, you’d think that it would come into play at some point in the finale.  Withdraw or making him entirely numb again (Like in Sam and Harry’s first fight).  It should have come full circle.  It should have played SOME part in his demise, but it didn’t.  In fact, there was no point to it at all.

It didn’t make him more or less evil.  It didn’t make him more or less relatable.  They didn’t use it in a way to explain anything.  Not his actions or his motivations.  It was complexity that was added as a superficial trait and then not used in the narrative at all.

Shameful writing.

ಠ_ಠ

Wasn’t Blake the head of a massive Chinese mafia?

At some point, they completely forgot about the Wu Chi.  His prison fight was fabricated ahead of time and the Snake Hands carried out his instructions, and then ... just vanished.  He is supposed to be the head of a massive Chinese mafia and yet, they all just vanished.

Any Wu Chi guards at his factory?  Nope.  Of course not, otherwise how would Harry just sneak in at the end.  Any Wu Chi guards helping him infiltrate Madame Cheng’s stronghold?  Nope.  I ... guess ... not?  Did they run out of money for asian extras?

Couldn’t they have scrubbed the unnecessary trip to Hong Kong to pay for more extras?

So, what was the point of him being a Dragon Head again? 

In the end, there was no point.

ಠ_ಠ

Blake was all about planning ahead and he didn’t steal the Uranium BEFORE he got himself purposefully arrested?

Don’t even get me started on the plot from 3x06.  Blake’s plan was to get arrested, fake his death, and break out?  Even the whole “waking up in the morgue” thing didn’t make sense.  Why didn’t Eve get his body out?  Why was she just waiting outside for him?!  Ugh, I digress ... focus on 3x08, focus on just 3x08 ...

So Blake’s been setting up this fission chamber for a while, right?  He brags about buying that factory years earlier in preparation.  In fact, he’s even got a handful of handy scientists to get it all up for him.  How clever, I guess?  But, he never bothered getting the Uranium before he purposefully got himself arrested?  His entire plan hinged on being able to get his hands on MOTHER FUCKING URANIUM ... and he didn’t plan ahead for that ... at all?  His entirely plan was to wait until his access was revoked and then find someone to torture the information out of?

That’s ... uh ... really, really weak.  This entire fission / nuclear thing seemed like an afterthought in the writing room when they realized they’d written themselves into a corner.

Writer 1:  Ah shit.  How is Blake even gonna destroy them?  It doesn’t make sense that the Torches would bring the forging weapons to London.  They had to have hidden them, right?

Writer 2: *having just watched The Strain*  I KNOW!  Let’s have him NUKE THEM!

ಠ_ಠ

Seriously, Harry basically killed that poor scientist.

This wasn’t a plot hole, but it seriously bothered me.  You know that man.  The one he strangely head butted.  The one messing with the fission machine.  Was the man even evil?  Did he know what he was hired to do?  Did he know that the controlled fission reaction was to destroy magical braclets and the chain reaction would melt down and likely kill him and thousands of people?  Doesn’t matter, he wasn’t useful to the plot, so Harry just ... killed him.

How did Harry know how to remove the Uranium?

He just walks over, reaching in to the machine, turns it and pulls it out.  He didn’t even know what it looked like.  I guess he was just ... lucky?  Pfffttt.  Whatever.  It’s just a little thing, but it’s still fucking lazy.

Why wasn’t Blake armed?  What the fuck was he doing?

There’s simply no way that Blake would have been walking around the factory without his gun.  He would have just shot Harry from above.  And before anyone says: He wouldn’t risk the fission machine!  He was wearing the bracelet.

This was so fabricated.  Was he pooping or something and that’s why he set his gun down on the desk?

And again, why didn’t he have Wu Chi guards ... or even a surveillance system set up?  There’s NO WAY that place didn’t have security if he had a fission machine INSTALLED in it.  And he already said he’d owned it from several years.

Seriously?  WTF Lucky Man.

ಠ_ಠ

Why didn’t Blake notice Eve had escaped?

She was tied to the fission machine and he didn’t even notice she was gone.  Ok then ... maybe it was because he was high?!  They didn’t even bother to address it at all.  Not to mention the fact that ... wasn’t it unlucky to Blake for Eve to have escaped?  Wasn’t he wearing the bracelet?

Also, wasn’t it unlucky for Eve to have put the other one on him?  Shouldn’t she have tripped or something?  Shouldn’t he have been able to stop her BECAUSE of the bracelet he was already wearing?!

Writers: Create the rules for your world and then stick to them.  Don’t change things because you want a scene to play out a specific way.  You make the rules, so stick to them.

ಠ_ಠ

Harry’s hiding in his brother’s flat.

The entire country is on the lookout for Harry and Blake.  He’s considered a domestic terrorist at this point and he’s hiding ... in his brother’s flat.

Where the fuck is Mi5?!  Seriously, no.  This is SO dumb.  FFS.

No one’s tracking his brother or his brother’s phone.  No one’s bothering with anything.  Harry keeps walking out into public.  He approaches the Security Guards in the URANIUM shipment (armed guards), and even tells them HIS NAME.  I find it unlikely that security professionals wouldn’t have been even MORE briefed on him than the general public (which already was).

ಠ_ಠ

Eve was pregnant.

I guess this was a poor attempt to explain away her sudden motivational shift, but it was so contrived.

So what?  Samuel forgot to wrap it?  Fucking unlikely, don’t you think?  Was he super, super high one night or something?  Because, you’ve shown us he’s incredibly pedantic and he plans everything TO A TEE.

I guess Eve forgot she wasn’t on birth control either?  Maybe she was super high too, I guess?

Maybe the condom broke and it just slipped Blake’s mind?  Given, unplanned pregnancies obviously occur, but I find it unbelievable that it would happen between these two characters as you’ve presented them to us.

Also, how long were they even together?  Was it days or was it weeks?

In the end, she was the character I felt should have gotten her just deserts MORE THAN ANYONE ELSE and yet, she lived.  She was inconsistent, without loyalty or morals or ethics, and she gets to live.  Thanks Lucky Man.

ಠ_ಠ

So ... To Summarize:

Lucky Man wasn’t a good show, but it was a hell of a guilty pleasure and I’m actually gutted it’s over, because I loved watching Rupert work again and hot damn, did Mr. Penry-Jones look smashing in it (as always).

Cheers.

[whitefangworldbuilding]

RWBY: The Rise of Sienna Khan (Headcanon)

This catalogs the White Fang during their time as a diplomatic organization and their evolution into a para-military force under the leadership of Sienna Khan, as well as the details of what brought about these changes.

After the Faunus Rights Revolution came to a close and the White Fang was formed, those who had distinguished themselves were offered new ranks and roles in the fledgling order.

Some, like Kali Belladonna, exhausted from combat and high level politics, turned the offers down to rest and recover falling into less charged supportive roles. 

Others, such as Sienna and Ghira, took to their roles with passion.

The first High Leader of the White Fang (Unnamed) was an elder and a Holy One, revered for their knowledge of ancient Faunus culture and wise council during the revolution. The elder had been integral in negotiating a ceasefire and being popular and respected on most sides was a natural choice as leader. 

They chose Ghira to be one of their diplomatic seconds, while asking Sienna to be the new head of the White Fang’s security, a position she accepted gratefully.

Over the course of the next few years Sienna spent her time training and organizing the White Fang’s security forces. Even going so far as to create a hidden class of ‘watchers’, Faunus who could escape notice or pass for human who disguised themselves and kept watch on the streets to report back suspicious activity or jump in to protect isolated Faunus under attack.

She also began more casual self defense programs, feeling no Faunus should be unable to defend themselves. While not popular with some of the more peaceful members, the voluntary nature of the program allowed it to continue.

It was not many years before the White Fang's leader stepped down however, promoting Ghira as their replacement. (The current High Leader was aging and tired of politicking) There was a brief election but no real challenger stepped up.

Thing continued along there well known path for several years, in that time, one Blake Belladonna was born, Ilia would find herself orphaned and taken into the White Fang and Adam Taurus would catch several security force members eyes for his talent in combat.

However, threats were everywhere.

Three overt threats stood in the way of the White Fang’s mission and Faunus equality.

1. Indifference. With each year that passed, the number of politicians, councilor, new programs ETC that bothered to meet with the White Fang, let alone offer funding, vanished to the point of near non existence. Leaving the organization dependent on grass roots fund raising. The media narrative quickly stopped viewing the White Fang as a diplomatic organization and instead as 'rabble-rousers’ just one of many groups of Faunus that could be dismissed as a 'noise makers’ and 'thugs’.

2. Human supremacy groups. Where most humans were content to ignore Faunus or passively benefit from their disenfranchisement, for these groups that was not enough. They loathed how the last war turned out, hated that Faunus walked “their” streets and worked 'their" jobs in “Their” kingdoms, (The irony that Faunus built said Kingdoms was lost on them) These groups were organized thanks to the CCT, often had friends in the police, militia and hunting communities often proving extremely violent.

3. The SDC and other large companies found ways around the Faunus’s 'on paper’ legal equality. Utilizing faulty contracts, biased work assignments (Sending Faunus to poorly equipped and dangerous mines) and going so far as to create debt programs where they made basic supplies at their mines so expensive the workers would either starve of go into debt just to stay alive and be forced to work unfair hours just to break even. (They often needed to do this slowly to avoid immediate emotional backlash luring in the Grimm, but once instituted the exhaustion would stop any overly large masses of Grimm from affecting the mines,)

As mine accidents, tales of families torn apart and abuse revelations spread through the kingdoms the White Fang pushed for recognition and aid, but were ignored.

Many police and hunter abused their power and struck down innocent Faunus, but when the White Fang asked for justice, they were ignored.

When Human Supremacy organization burnt stores and attacked Faunus, Faunus were blamed or the humans found innocent of all wrong doing.

Calls for unity, respect and common decency made in passionate speeches and chanted in streets were never broadcast or met by tear gas and riot police. Faunus defending themselves and others were blamed for starting the conflicts by the media 

Into this, the previous High Leader stepped in and with their carefully cultivated connections began to arrange for some improvements. However, their life was threatened by human supremacy groups.

Sienna Khan asked, nay pleaded, to allow her to assign a full escort to ensure their safety, but she was argued down.

“Show you expect the worst and that is what people will often give you. But show hope and openness and you may just be surprised” the former leader and Ghira argued.

Sienna held the opposite view. Feeling preparing for the worst would better let one meet it and cow those who would be too fearful to act should they know they would be met by resistance.

However she was only able to assigned a small group of Watchers to the former High Leader.

Within a week, Human Supremacy members, in hand with 'rogue’ police, raided their house and killed the retired High Leader. The Watchers too few and reinforcements too far to act.

Grief, gripped the White Fang and Faunus communities. The scene of Kali, Ghira and Sienna standing in the former High Leaders room, before their body were burnt into people’s memories; the sobs and growls that filled the house forever burned into the memory of every Faunus present. As was the horrendous abuse their former High Leader had suffered in death.

Despite evidence and Gira’s demands, the police showed little interest in investigating (Sienna did not even bother asking, merely having a human passing Faunus bail her watchers out of prison). The former High Leaders allies, disappeared like puffs of smoke.

Upon returning to base, tensions were high and the grief was thick. Arguments and accusations flew before exhaustion and grim acceptance claimed even the leadership.

It was time for change.

Without warning, Sienna Khan declared a challenge before Ghira and the White Fang’s core membership as others gathered for mourning or guidance.

The humans have met the Faunus with fire and hatred since the dawn of time and have only ever listened to reason when it was accompanied by force. A noble advocate for peace and friendship was butchered in their own home, how long before they are all next? How long must their kin toil in the mines with none to offer them salvation? Because morality alone will not make the humans listen. How long must the Faunus live in fear?

Sienna Khan declared no more.

She promised not to just speak for their people but to fight for them as well. To meet those who would take their lives, their homes and their freedom with fangs and claws bared and to those with the strength and will to do so, she asked them to stand with her. Those without, she asked they stand behind her, so she might shield them and be buoyed by their support.

Ghira accepted the challenge and lost by an over 65 percent margin. After a respectful exchange of rank and power, Sienna Khan delivered a brief speech, before declaring the time for words had truly passed.

It was time to get to work.

Watchers were posted, security teams and volunteers organized and on that very night they struck at the heart of a large interconnected meeting of human supremacy organization. 

The humans celebrated the death of the High Leader and plotted next the death of other high ranking White Fang, whether for their rank, Ghira, power, Sienna, or seeming vulnerability, Kali. All with the intent of beginning a new Faunus war.

They got the battle they were seeking.

The power was cut and only the Scrolls connecting the other meeting members in the crammed stdio apartment shone.

Then, a new light glowed, a furious, churning red as Sienna revealed herself and struck, followed by her soldiers.

The battle was over within minutes, and to those watching, she had but one message: Human kind had not listened to reason, so they would know fear.

What followed was at first treated like a gang war, then riots, then a burgeoning revolution.

Stores that served as human supremacy bases or supporters or that denied Faunus were burnt. High ranking Human Supremacy members found themselves cut down and even the mighty SDC was not safe as mine overseers and those that oversaw the deaths of debt slavery of thousands of Faunus were found dead.

Sienna was careful though, she had accrued this information over years of long work as a byproduct of her duties as head of security. When she and her forces struck it was quickly efficiently and always on specific targets, with their motives and reasons laid out clearly when needed to minimize collateral damage to civilians and to avoid undermining their cause. 

As the violence rose, Ghira and Kali Belladonna returned to Menagerie but left their daughter who refused to join them under Sienna Khan’s aegis.  

Then, before a true war could break out, the White Fang scattered, went to ground  and snuck out of the kingdoms, coming to recollect at Fort Castle.

From this fort, mine liberation were organized, supply trains raided and their underground units within the kingdoms funneled their soldiers back in and new recruits joined in earnest, while Sienna Khan reached out to Faunus communities deep in the wilds to offer the White Fang’s aid.

The Shadow War of the White Fang had begun.

[rwbbyish]

Ilia Amitola is Not a Fucking Villain : A Rant On Why Y’all Are Wrong

So SPOILERS to anyone who hasn’t seen the new episode; this rant is getting put below the cut! 

Alright fuckers let me start this off by getting a few things off my chest; I am a  l e s b i a n .    :O : O  : O  NOW: There is nothing homophobic about a gay character being “evil”. I understand there is a “societal practice of turning gay characters evil, or portraying them as bad” but here is the thing, THERE IS ABSOLUTELY 100% NOTHING WRONG WITH HAVING GAY CHARACTERS WHEN THEIR VILLAINY HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THEM BEING GAY. Let me say that again for the people in the back; A gay character being a villain is not damaging to gay people so fucking long as they are not evil because they are gay. Lets think about this in more practical terms; Ilia is a Faunus and as we all know the Faunus have a background of discrimination purely because of what they were born as. This means the Faunus are meant to be representations of minorities essentially, or a stand in for that in Remnant as we have not seen discrimination on the basis of anything between humans. Ilia Amitola is one of these stand-ins. In Blake’s Character Short; we learn why she joins the White Fang despite looking human. We begin by learning that her parents worked in (assumedly Schnee) dust mines as labourers and by working for long enough they manage to get enough cash to send her to an Atlas prep school.  But in order to maintain her enrolment she must abide by some rules;

-No bringing home friends

-No talking about her parents

-Under no circumstances could she change colours

Ilia goes on to remark that it wasn’t hard to do those things especially if she was allowed to stay in Atlas (A city of dreams as she remarks earlier). She even joins in when some of the girls begin to make remarks about the Faunus, as this point everything is going well for Ilia and as long as she lies and continues to pass for human she is fine. When there is a cave in at her parents mine she learns about it in the middle of her school day; her friends laugh (unbeknownst to them that Ilia was a Faunus, this would have been the usual) and Ilia cannot hold it together. She cries; her whole body turning blue. She’s finally given up her ruse, she isn’t like them. Suddenly these girls, her best friends, can’t look at her the same and Ilia says that she “broke their teeth.” Clearly betrayed Ilia doesn’t know who to believe anymore, then she meets Blake, and for once she finds someone with (while not the same story) but the same spark. Someone just like her who wants to genuinely listen to her story and talk to her about being Faunus. So she falls in love. But Blake has her eyes on Adam and as Adam favours Blake Ilia begins to feel left behind, this breaks her heart. The person who she used to be so close to suddenly just won’t look at you the same way anymore, it cuts her so deep to know that even someone just like her, a Faunus, could betray her too. Of course there is jealousy, of course it hurts her and she is bitter towards Blake but notice; Ilia has been warning Blake about the danger to her family since Volume 4. When they meet on the roof, and Ilia attacks Sun, Ilia warns “You shouldn’t have come back” but never once does she attack Blake.  Then we see her interrupt Blake’s father during his Haven speech; where she slanders the Belladonna’s name. Why? Because she genuinely believe that she is following the right path, that fear is the only way to solve their problem. She is a brainwashed 19 year old. When Corsac and Fennec tell her of their plan notice the way they praise her; “Your maturity and understanding in regards to this matter is appreciated” and as soon as she learns that the Belladonna’s must be silenced she backs up. Eyes wide. Afraid.  She is terrified, she does not want to hurt the girl she loves, that’s remorse. A necessary sacrifice is what she said when Sienna died, and what Corsac tells her when referring to the Belladonna’s. This whole plan fights against everything she knows, her ideals for a better Faunus life and her love. Ilia is conflicted. She has never known love from anyone, and she wants to live in a world where her people are happy, honestly, a noble ideal. She knows what she is doing is wrong but it is necessary in her eyes because the Faunus using peace has never worked. Ilia is not motivated to hurt the Belladonnas because of how she feels about Blake. Ilia is motivated because Ilia is lost and afraid and knows nothing better to do; these people she looks up to (Corsac and Fennec) are telling her she is doing the right thing, and she has to believe them because she has never managed to do the right thing herself. Ilia is a gay character who is morally gray. She does not act out of evil, only loss, only hurt and fear. Ilia is a great character if people can learn to look into her actual character instead of going >:VV eVIL N GAY!! MILES! KERRY!! TIME TO DIE!!

You guys need to learn that gay people can be anything instead of your uwu perfect gay babbies UWU and that Ilia isn’t even EVIL in any sense of the word, she is simply a grunt following orders with CLEAR remorse.

[randomaccount2]

EVERYTHING WRONG WITH: RWBY VOLUME 5 CHAPTER 11

> Just what is that statue even? Is there any reason as to why it's there? Any history behind it? > "You seem to be more than last time." That's a little obvious don't you think Leo? > "Why do you have your weapons with you?" At that moment everyone should be running for their lives. It's that obvious! > Who shot her? Yang isn't in her combat stance, and nobody else has their weapons out. > Wait... Lionheart is a faunus? REALLY?! The most powerful man on remnant is a member of the supposedly horribly oppressed group? How is that even racism in any form? He couldn't have hid that all this time! That totally nullifies any claim of racism in this show at all! HE'S THE HEADMASTER OF THE WORLD'S LARGEST KINGDOM FOR FUCKS SAKE AT LEAST STAY CONSISTENT! > "... and made a choice." Actually it seems like Leo didn't have a choice at all. > All that time everyone said Salem can't be defeated, yet nobody gave any reason why. > Oh you're one to talk Ruby, you only heard about Salem from your intoxicated uncle in a shitty campfire scene. > Cue the motivating speech sequence. > Raven is not pleased > Oh shit, she dropped the bomb! > Fireball shoots out of newly opened portal. Nobody has that reaction time. > Fireball perfectly and directly shoots Ruby, as if Cinder could see through it. What if Raven wanted to escape and got shot instead? > Cue the dramatic music > "Hello boys and girls." Cinder, you had time to think about a dramatic entrance since Volume 3, and that's all you come up with? This isn't even better than Adam's dramatic entrance in Volume 3. > Hazel just comes in as if he magically knew that the cat is out of the bag yet. He could have ruined everything, EVERYTHIIING. > He didn't even look at anybody, and unveiled the great nefarious plan. FFS Hazel it could have just been innocent visitors. > In only two minutes the white fang arrived, took out the overly large supply of bombs and placed bombs everywhere without making a sound? > Also these bombs are way too close to each other. For something of this size, you'd think only one of those could blow up I don't know... an entire train wagon! > Uh, yeah Adam what do you think everyone places these bombs here for. They probably already know Haven is going to fall. > Wow Weiss, you sure are fast. > Wow Qrow, you sure are fast. > Yes Jaune, what is wrong with Cinder? She's been here since episode one and nobody knows anything about her at all. > Why are they taking out their weapons? They have absolutely no reason to. They should really listen to Qrow. > Miles voice acting is really great! Minus one sin - > Weiss and Nora are taking out their weapons too? Why though? None of the bad guys even have their weapons out! FFS LISTEN TO QROW! > Cinder doesn't need her fire powers to deliver burns. > Jaune it's obvious she's trying to provo- oh, there he goes. > Ruby you can instantly break the sound barrier, you don't need to waste ammunition to go fast. > See, Ruby if you used your semblance, you could have gotten past the chain. > Cue the gay subtext > Cinder charges at Jaune, but they magically disappear in the next shot. > We hear Merc's gunboots go off as if he jumped, but in the next shot, he stands exactly where he was before. > "Let's see what the Schnee family name really means." "I'm more than a name!" **mortal combat's "Fight!" can be heard in the distance.** > Hazel can see Oscar sneak up away, clearly Oscar could become a threat, so why doesn't he act on it? > It's been entire 5 minutes, and Ren and Nora are still standing there, wordlessly facing Lionheart. > Really Leo? You know about Salem and magic, but you can't guess that Ozpin can reincarnate and that he is probably behind this child right now? > IT'S TIME TO DDDDD-DUEL! > Seriously now. A child with an ancient spirit inside him fight a man with what might as well be a duel disk? This really is Yugioh. > Why is there a magic circle now? I thought only maidens and Ozpin have magic. > Uh WHAT even is that thing? > Is Oscar's Aura already depleted? Or did he just activate it? Horray Oscar got better with his Aura! > I know they're trying to make Oscar look badass, but why isn't Leo attacking? He's a trained Huntsman against a 14 year old boy! > Leo do you honestly think Salem is going to leave you alone? Once she has the relic she's just going to dispose of you. > Obligatory Yugioh reference. > Isn’t it obvious Oscar? > Meanwhile Weiss is playing The Floor is Lava > This would be a great opportunity to put in a new song for the soundtrack. That only consists of 3 songs. That we last heard before Chapter 1. That was eleven weeks ago. > At this point Weiss should have learned that summoning doesn't work. Weiss, you have a broad repartoire of glyphs, but you choose to use the slowest against the fastest enemy? You can bend time for fucks sake! > Ruby is just casually watching Jaune during a fight. > Instead of hitting Ruby with her blades or doing anything, Emerald just spams bullets. > Ruby can magically deflect all the bullets with the handle of a scythe that's bigger than most humans. > Weiss didn't learn from her mistakes and turns her back to her enemy. Then this happens. > Everyone stop fighting to the death, somebody almost got hurt! > Ruby is in the middle of a fight, but turns around to look at Jaune. > Cinder can fly apparently. > Please ignore the sudden artstyle change, we didn't have the resources to remake the models. > Okay, now Ruby is about to activates her silver eyes, which itself is enough to bring cinder to her knees, but why didn't she know how to do that in the first place? She had all the time to ask Tai, Qrow and even Ozpin himself, but she didn't. It's been almost a year since she knows about the Silver eyes, and that she can basically beat any Grimm and every maiden with just one look, but she doesn't try to control it, because plot. > Come on Jaune, she's on the ground without Aura, but you try to stab her instead of slashing like any sane person would do? You could have finished this god dammit! > Jaune you trained for all this time, and still don't know how to stand properly when using your weapon? Also you could have just taken a step forward instead of falling over like a sac of potatoes. > Why did you drop your weapon? You're trying to survive! > Reusing opening animations > Jaune did you honesly think she'd listen to you when you basically say, don't kill them? > Does this fire spear look familliar? Here's a hint: It's Pyrrha's spear. > Jaune you have more than enough time to get up and throw yourself onto her, or stab her in the back. Instead you just scream NOOOO like somebody who is completely incapacitated. > Reusing Pyrrha's death animation > Weiss didn't make any sound, but yet everyone magically stops fighting to their bloody death for a second, only too look at Weiss being stabbed to death. Like what did you expect? > Apparently Jaune didn't cry, even though we saw him cry for the first time three times already. > Weiss faints, and the spear dissipates. Meanwhile Cinder sees a wounded Weiss that she wanted to kill. If Cinder really wanted to kill Weiss, she could have just burned her this instant, so why does she leave Weiss alive? > Black screen of death. Along with the worst damn cliffhanger RWBY has ever given us. > The CRWBY only knows one way to end an episode. Which is a cliffhanger.

BONUS SINS:

> Whenever one person stops talking, the camera just cuts to another person that starts to talk. For a fight scene this was an awful lot of talking. > Aparently one week isn't enough for Blake to arrive at Haven. And it looks like all the bombs have been set already. Let's see how Miles and Kerry try to save this one. > Nobody believes that Sienna Kahn is dead. Nobody believes Weiss is dead. It seems to me like something with the writing isn't right.

[ajvlogsandstuff]

RWBY V5E13: Downfall (SPOILERS) and what I didn’t like about it

Now, I should place some prefaces before the pitchforks and torches come out. THIS IS NOT A RWDE POST. I love RWBY. I see it as a truly creative show and after nearly 5 years of watching, I am extremely invested in the world, characters and issues of the universe. Now, despite that, I am aware that the show has issues - some minute, some glaring, and some vastly blown out of proportion. I am not one of those people who send death threats to the CRWBY because of a stupid shipping war (you know which one I am talking about) or a character’s death, but I also don’t just accept everything the writers do blindly, as being demonstrated in this post below. That being said, I have one or two issues, one particularly major to me, that I want to discuss in the post below. Obviously, there are MAJOR spoilers under the cut below, so make sure you have watched the episode before reading this - as despite what I am saying, it is still one of the better episodes of the past volume - and then come back to read this. Now, let’s get into this…

So to start with, I would like to discuss my thoughts on the volume as a whole so far. I honestly have liked this volume a lot more than Volume 4 for one main reason: I haven’t had every episode be ruined for me by that half of the FNDM. Not saying that the FNDM is bad - some of the content being produced and discussed is amazing and I love it - but like most over fandoms on this site, the negatives vastly outweigh the positives. Be it death threats (of which I have received several from the fandom - more later), ships being forced down my throat and general overreactions to everything, I have tried to regulate the time I spend reacting to the show more with friends online and in person than scrolling the RWBY tag. 

But as I was saying, Volume 5 has actually been a vast improvement despite what everyone says: the graphics have had such a drastic increase from just a few months. The action is much better than Volume 4 - everything feels less floaty again and the environments for the fights (i.e. cargo ship, falling rocks, burning house) are much more varied and dynamic. Whilst the story has had moments of slowing down, it never felt to me as if it was unnecessary. Maybe some of the middle episodes could have been cut down to 1 longer episodes, but it doesn’t really matter to me in the long run. I will be posting a few posts in the coming weeks discussing my thoughts on how particular characters have played out this season (the first one being quite an interesting read given what has happened in this episode), but if relevant, I will discuss them later in this post.

Now, this isn’t to say I hated this episode. The Cinder and Raven fight is quite possibly the most visual and high-octane fight in the show so far, and had a song that I need to own right now. The bits of action we got with Emerald, Mercury and Hazel were… good, just give us more please. And the two semblance confirmations - Jaune’s and particularly Hazel’s - were interesting ideas and leave lots of room for future development. However, for all the good things we have in this episode, there were issues. So after all that, here we go.

1. The lack of screen time with villains:

Now, this isn’t just an issue in regards to this episode, more the show as a whole, but the villains do not get enough screen time in contrast to the other characters. Yes I know we spent pretty much half the episode with Cinder and Raven, but I would like to focus on the other villains present, being Emerald, Mercury, Hazel, Lionheart and Adam (this won’t be the last you will hear of Adam in this post, trust me).

First, I’ll start with the easiest on this list - Hazel, as he got a vast amount more than the other four present. Hazel in the past few episodes has been amazing, a breath of fresh air in contrast to the rest of the villains - a semi-unique backstory, an intriguing personality and motive, and one of my favourite weapons in the show. My issue is that due to so much focus being on Hazel crammed into the last three episodes that focus has shifted from where it could have been developing less developed characters. I still look forward to seeing more of this Mr. Hyde style villain, but let there be focus on the others.

Next up is the dynamic duo, Emerald and Mercury. My issue in this sense is that there is nowhere near enough screen time or development for these two. All we know about Mercury from his four Volumes on the show is that his dad was an alcoholic hitman who abused him, and that he has prosthesis, whilst all we know about Emerald is that she is a street rat that Cinder took in. That is it from FOUR VOLUMES. And I know you may argue that “other characters like Tyrian and Watts weren’t developed well”, but the point isn’t that they haven’t had development, it’s the fact that they have had so little development, despite having ample opportunity to. Mercury was one of the main characters in Volume 3 and everything we know about him was from a less than one minute scene in one episode. My point is that they have been in this area for 2 and a half episodes and have just been there in the background as goons for the protagonists to fight. The Yang and Mercury rematch should have been one of the highlights on the season, and we see it in the distance for about 3 seconds. Just give them more time, or just give us a scene of the two of them talking in Salem’s castle. ANYTHING! They are the only villains that the audience can in some way align with, so let us see them talk.

Lionheart is an odd situation. Episode 11 provided us with a lot of development for him, especially the revelation that he has been working with Salem for years. And then we get to see his thought processes of if he captures Oscar/Ozpin and brings him to Salem, that she will let him be free. “Yes, this is the development I have wanted for this intriguing character - what is he going to do in the next two episodes, I wonder?” Oh, sorry Andrew from two weeks ago, he does nothing except fire a few shots at Oscar. Really? You have the opportunity for a really interesting dynamic between Ozpin and Lionheart and you just have him sit on the sidelines. But don’t worry, it could be worse - you could do nothing, just like…

2. The writing of Adam Taurus:

Adam. Oh, Adam. Don’t get me wrong, I love you, Rooster Teeth. I really do. But this is the most insulting piece of writing I have ever seen for a character. Now, I will preface this by saying that Adam is my favourite character in the show, as he is the only character to have maintained a constant level of villainy throughout. Cinder did things under Salem’s orders. Tyrian did things under Salem’s orders. Hazel did things under Salem’s orders. Adam did all of those things FOR HIMSELF. He didn’t have to cut off Yang’s arm - he did it out of bloodlust. He didn’t have to kill Sienna - he did it out of a want for power. He didn’t have to send his forces to attack the Belladonna household - he did it because he wanted to. This man has been constantly portrayed in every scene he is in as a ruthless, vindictive and remorseless terrorist. And what does he do for three episodes? NOTHING! He plants the bombs on the tower and just stays there! This is the man that aided in the fall of Beacon, took out the leader of the White Fang in one hit, and even at one point intimidated Cinder Fall.

But okay, they may have just finished planting the bombs and were preparing to fall back to a perimeter. Let’s say that is what is happening - give RT the benefit of the doubt. Then as they fall back, Blake shows up. Okay, coincidental timing, but that’s RWBY for you. But who cares - this is the confrontation we have been waiting for, not just since the fall of Beacon, but since the Black Trailer. Adam was one of the first characters introduced in the show, introduced even before Yang. This is what Blake has been training for the past few seasons. The embodiment of her past trauma.The literal figurehead of her nightmares. And guess what?

She beats him in one hit. ONE HIT. No fight, no fitting ending, no last laugh. She defeats him with a FIST TO THE BACK. Yes, I know it is poetic - Adam has defeated everyone with one hit, so he gets defeated with one hit. But think about it. We have seen Adam fight in the Black trailer - he is clearly superior to Blake in terms of combat. He should have wiped the floor with her.

“Oh, but he was reckless and tricked by Blake’s semblance” - this man was her mentor and partner. He was probably the person who helped her unlock her semblance in the first place, never mind the months/years they spent together fighting in the White Fang. He wouldn’t forget about her semblance, it is just lazy writing. Blake has said in the show that she always runs away from everything, and that her semblance is an extension of that. The whole point of her arc is that she can’t keep running away from him. And she defeats him by using her SEMBLANCE. All ideas of it being poetic and monumental are thrown away by that point alone. 

And that would have been bad enough, but they also had to make Adam’s character a thundering dumbass at the flick of a switch. Not only does he threaten to blow himself up knowing that it would kill himself, despite being the most egocentric character in the show, he also only brought 8 MEN WITH HIM! This man is a leader of a terrorist military force and brought 8 men with him to one of the most important missions in years. 

Now this wouldn’t be so bad if they had made it seem like Adam would go down this route, but in the brief amount we had seen him earlier in the Volume,  he was made out to have become more ruthless and unhinged than we saw him in Volume 3, a dictator style leader who would transform the White Fang into more of a threat. But all of that development gets thrown out of the window when you completely shift a character’s personality on a dime.

And my main issue with this is that most of the community is loving it, happy that he is gone and wilfully accepting the writing. I am not going to petition RT to change the show like some have for other issues (such as #BringBackPyrrha) or send death threats. I know that there is still an episode left and anything could happen. Hell, Adam may even bounce back better from this, where instead of leading the White Fang, he ruthlessly hunts down Blake and keeps to his promise of “destroying everything she loves”. I just hope that this isn’t the last we have seen of my favourite silver-ey—- i mean, favourite character.

3. BMBLB:

Oh boy, I am going to get hate for this. Now look, I don’t hate BMBLB, never have. My issue with the ship is the obsessive nature of the FNDM rather than with the show. I used to be a Black Sun shipper (I’m not anymore, but I still think they should get together from a screenwriter’s standpoint) and every single time I would post about ships, I would get barraged by BMBLB shippers. My main issue is people taking a moment of any two characters interacting and saying it is proof that the ship is canon. And I know other ships do this, but never to the extent I have seen BMBLB. 

So, straight up, THIS IS NOT AN ISSUE WITH THE EPISODE, but just something I would like to say to the FNDM. Just because two characters interact doesn’t mean they are canon. So, I would just like to provide some context to a particular moment in this episode. 

When Blake first enters the hall - yes, she does acknowledge Yang specifically - but this is for one reason. The last time Blake saw Yang, she was being carried away unconscious with a missing arm. Blake knows how ruthless Adam is and assumed that she was dead. Blake ran while Yang was still in a critical condition. She says Yang because she is amazed that she survived, likely incited by having just seen Adam and recalling what happened. 

I’m just going to leave it at that, don’t tear me apart. Please.

4. The waste of potential

This point is less important, but I feel it still needs to be touched upon. Now, there is still an episode left and, as I said prior, anything could still happen. My point being that - to me - Cinder’s death would be a waste of potential. Yes, it wouldn’t effect the show as much as Raven dying instead or someone like Weiss dying, but killing off not only a Maiden, but currently the heroes’ main antagonist and rival would be too rushed. 

Cinder is a character who has ties to so many characters: she is Ruby’s foil and is the only character so far effected by her silver-eyes. She is Jaune’s main antagonist in the series, essentially being his final goal in terms of avenging Pyrrha. She is the mentor to both Mercury and Emerald, a rival to both Watts and Tyrian, and an apprentice to Salem, never mind the ramifications of being the first (known) human-Grimm hybrid. Killing her here with someone who she only met a few episodes ago would feel too contrived in my opinion. 

“But Raven froze her as he was falling”. Raven broke out of ice literally last episode and, oh yeah, Maidens can fly. Also, if she is dead, someone would have gotten her Maiden powers already. But anyway, I’m just spit-balling theories now. I think it’s time we concluded this monster of a post now.

Conclusion

Now look, despite (almost) all of the points above, I did still like the episode and I am hyped as all hell for the finale next week. I just hope that some of the issues are resolved, some sooner than others. AKA, “Please RT, don’t fuck up all the work you did with Adam. If this is the end of his story, then you have wasted vast potential”.

Anyway, I hope that you all enjoyed this discussion/rant and I am most excited to review the Volume next week. I will be posting lots of character analysis and theories in the coming weeks too, so look out for those.

Yours sincerely,

Andrew Sangster

p.s. just keep writing adam pls

[faunusrights]

Headcanon: Succession

I am unsure if this fits within Submission guidelines, sorry!  ssh no more apologising only good posts

After the Faunus Rights Revolution came to a close and the White Fang was formed, those who had distinguished themselves found themselves being offered new ranks and roles. 

Some, like Kali Belladonna, exhausted from combat and high level politics, turned the offers down to rest and recover. 

Others, such as Sienna and Ghira, took to their roles with rigor. 

The first High Leader of the White Fang (Unnamed) had been a high ranking leader, though not quite general during the war and had been integral in negotiating a ceasefire. They chose Ghira to be one of their diplomatic seconds, while asking Sienna to be the new head of the White Fang’s security, a position she accepted gratefully. 

Over the course of the next few years Sienna spent her time training and organizing the White Fang’s security forces. Even going so far as to create a hidden class of ‘watchers’, Faunus who could escape notice or pass for human who disguised themselves and kept watch on the streets to report back suspicious activity or jump in to protect isolated Faunus under attack. 

She also began a youth training program, feeling no Faunus should be unable to defend themselves. While not popular with some of the more peaceful members, the voluntary nature of the program allowed it to continue. 

It was not many years before the White Fang;s leader stepped down however, promoting Ghira as their replacement. (The current High Leader was aging and wary of politicking) There was a brief election but no real challenger stepped up. 

Thing continued along there well know path for several years, in that time, one Blake Belladonna was born, Ilia would find herself orphaned and taken into the White Fang and Adam Taurus would catch several security force members eyes for his talent in combat. 

However, threats and pot holes were everywhere. 

Three overt threats stood in the way of the White Fang;s mission and Faunus equality. 

1. Indifference. With each year that passed, the number of politicians, councilor, new programs ETC that bothered to meet with the White Fang, let alone offer funding, vanished to the point of near non existence. Leaving the organization dependent on grass roots fund raising. The media narrative quickly stopped viewing the White Fang as a diplomatic organization and instead as ‘rabble-rousers’ just one of many groups of Faunus that could be dismissed as a ‘noise makers’ and 'thugs’. 

2. Human supremacy groups. Where most humans were content to ignore Faunus or passively benefit, for these groups that was not enough. They loathed how the last war turned out, hated that Faunus walked “their” streets and worked 'their" jobs in “Their” kingdoms, (The irony that Faunus built said Kingdoms was lost on them) These groups were organized thanks to the CCT, often had friends in the police, militia and hunting communities and would often prove extremely violent. 

3. The SDC and other large companies found ways around the Faunus’s 'on paper’ legal equality. Utilizing faulty contracts, biased work assignments (Sending Faunus to poorly equipped and dangerous mines) and going so far as to create debt slavery programs where they made basic supplies at their mines so expensive the workers would either starve of go into debt just to stay alive and be forced to work unfair hours just to break even.  (They often needed to do this slowly to avoid immediate emotional backlash luring in the Grimm, but once instituted the exhaustion would stop any overly large masses of Grimm from affecting the mines,) 

As mine accidents, tales of families torn apart and abuse revelations trickled into the kingdoms the White Fang pushed for recognition and aid, and were ignored. 

As police and hunter abused their power and struck down innocent Faunus, the White Fang asked for justice, and were ignored. 

When Human Supremacy organization burnt stores and attacked Faunus, Faunus were blamed or the humans found innocent of all wrong doing. 

Calls for unity, respect and common decency made in passionate speeches and chanted in streets were never broadcast or met by tear gas and riot police. 

Into this, the previous High Leader stepped in and with their carefully cultivated connection did, almost. seem to be helping arrange for some improvements. However, their life was threatened by human supremacy groups. 

Sienna Khan asked, nay pleaded, to allow her to assign a full escort to ensure their safety, but she was argued down. 

“Show you expect the worst and that is what people will often give you. But show hope and openness and you may just be surprised” the former leader and Ghira argued. 

Sienna held the opposite view. Feeling preparing for the worst would better let one meet it and cow those who would be too fearful to act should they know they would be met by resistance. 

However she was only able to assigned a small group of Watchers to the former High Leader. 

Within a week, Human Supremacy members, in hand with 'rogue’ police, raided their house and killed the retired High Leader. The Watchers too few and reinforcements too far to act. 

Grief, gripped the White Fang and the Faunus. The scene of Kali, Ghira and Sienna standing in the former High Leaders room and before their body, the sob and growls that filled the house forever burned into every Faunus presents memory. As was the horrendous abuse their former High Leader had suffered in death. 

Despite evidence and Gira’s demands, the police showed little interest in investigating (Sienna did not even bother asking, merely having a human passing Faunus bail her watchers out of prison). The former High Leaders allies, disappeared like puffs of smoke. returning to their base. 

Upon returning to base, tensions were high and the grief was thick. Arguments and accusations flew before exhaustion and grim acceptance claimed even the leadership. 

It was time for change. 

Without warning, Sienna Khan declared a challenge before Ghira and the White Fang’s core membership and so many others gathered for mourning or guidance. 

The humans have met the Faunus with fire and hatred since the dawn of time and have only ever listened to reason when it was accompanied by force. A noble advocate for peace and friendship was butchered in their own home, how long before they are all next? How long must their kin toil in the mines with none to offer them salvation, because morality alone will not make them listen? How long must the Faunus live in fear? 

Sienna Khan declared no more. 

She promised not to just speak for their people but to fight for them as well. To meet those who would take their lives, their homes and their freedom with fangs and claws bared and to those with the strength and will to do so, she asked them to stand with her. Those without, she asked they stand behind her, so she might shield them and be buoyed by their support. 

Ghira accepted the challenge and lost by an over 65 percent margin. After a respectful exchange of rank and power, Sienna Khan delivered a brief speech, before declaring the time for word had truly passed. 

It was time to get to work. 

Watcher were posted, security teams and volunteers organized and on that very night they struck at the heart of a large interconnected meeting of human supremacy organization. The humans celebrated the death of the High Leader and plotted next the death of other high ranking White Fang, whether for their rank, Ghira, power, Sienna, or seeming vulnerability, Kali. All with the intent of beginning a new Faunus war. 

They got the battle they were seeking. 

The power was cut and only the Scrolls connecting the other meeting members in the crammed warehouse shone. 

Then, a new light glowed, a furious, churning red as Sienna revealed herself and struck, followed by her soldiers. 

The battle was over within minutes, and to those watching, she had but one message: Human kind had not listened to reason, so they would know fear.

What followed was at first treated like a gang war, then riots, then a burgeoning revolution. 

Stores that served as human supremacy bases or supporters or that denied Faunus were burnt. High ranking Human Supremacy members found themselves cut down and even the mighty SDC was not safe as mine overseers and those that oversaw the deaths of debt slavery of thousands of Faunus were found dead. 

Sienna was careful though, she had accrued this information over years of long work as a byproduct of her duties as head of security. When she and her forces struck it was quickly efficiently and always on their specific targets and alone, with their motives and reasons laid out clearly when needed. 

As the violence rose, Ghira and Kali Belladonna returned to Menagerie but left their daughter who refused to join them under Sienna Khan’s aegis.  

Then, before a true war could break out, the White Fang scattered, went to ground  and snuck out of the kingdoms, coming to recollect at Fort Castle. From this fort mine liberation were organized, supply trains raided and their underground units within the kingdoms funneled their soldiers back in and new recruited joined in earnest, while Sienna Khan reached out to Faunus communities deep in the wilds and offer the White Fang’s aid. 

The Shadow War of the White Fang had begun.