#imo v1 looks very square

[holymaccaronii]

Hnnnnggg I’m planning to design a papercraft model of V1 and Gabriel that can hold hands… that’d be really cool… “what if we were two gay paper figurines HOLDING hands AND in love”

Anyways here’s the idea for V1/V2. I’m not trying to make the body that complicated, yet still sort of accurate to his shape. I’m really hoping that my idea for switchable limbs can work, this would allow the next figurines released to be posable!

[doubleca5t]

wdym the Faunus discrimination thing sucks? Do you mean it's portrayal or the fact that it exists sucks?

DISCLAIMER: I really like RWBY and I think the show is generally going in the right direction. This just happens to be one part of the show I think is done very badly.

Faunus discrimination is, imo, the worst part of RWBY. It was badly written from the outset and never really improved. My reasoning for thinking it’s badly written mostly comes down to the old writing adage of “show don’t tell”. In a visual medium, this means that the things your viewers actually see on screen are always going to be more impactful than the things they are only told about. i.e. seeing a character defeat a giant monster is a better way to establish that they’re powerful than it is to have everyone in the town square talk about how powerful they are.

When it comes to the Faunus, RWBY does a lot of telling when they should really be showing, and the things they do show us actually serve to weaken the story they’re trying to tell.

1) We are told a lot about the horrific treatment that Faunus endure, but at no point in the story do we ever see it happening. Blake tells us that Schnee Dust Company runs mines where Faunus are forced to work under brutal conditions, but we don’t see a dust mine until V7, and that one’s already been abandoned. We never see so much as a flashback where Ilia’s parents are killed in a mining accident, we’re just told it happened. If you want an example of racism being shown on the show, you might point to Weiss in the last two episodes of V1, but think back to the actual point of contention between Blake and Weiss in those episodes. Sure Weiss expressed a bit of casual racism towards Sun, but the thing that actually set Blake off was Weiss speaking ill of the White Fang, not the Faunus as a whole. When the rest of the team goes looking for Blake after she disappears, Weiss doesn’t seem to care that Blake is a Faunus, she’s just angry that Blake was a member of the White Fang, and is able to put aside their differences as soon as she’s confident that Blake isn’t going back. That doesn’t really show systemic racism so much as it shows that Weiss had a grudge against the White Fang for messing with her family’s shit. The only REAL depiction of gross mistreatment of Faunus we actually see is Adam revealing a cattle brand across his face, which is somewhat undercut by the fact that a) this doesn’t happen until the end of V6 and b) Adam by this point is already an irredeemable villain minutes away from his much-deserved death. If you’re only going to show horrific racism once, why would you have the victim be one of the most hate-able characters on the whole show? And on top of all this, we are told that Faunus are disadvantaged in almost every part of society on Remnant and yet...

2) The Faunus we meet seem to be doing pretty well. Aside from Ilia and Adam, who I’ve already discussed, consider all the Faunus that we actually meet in RWBY. Blake is the daughter of either a big city Mayor or a Head of State depending on how you want to categorize Menagerie, and her family lives in a luxurious island villa. Sun is a carefree goofball who doesn’t seem to have any real grievance against Society™. We see a Faunus as the head of an Academy and another as a member of the Ace Ops. The majority of the Faunus live on Menagerie, which we are told is a bad thing because of overcrowding, but everything we actually see of it makes the island look like an idyllic spot for a tropical vacation. Now I’m not saying that it’s “unrealistic” to have wealthy or successful members of a minority in a society in which that minority is systemically oppressed. America has had 300 years of systemic racism against black people that is still very much a problem, but there are black doctors and lawyers and celebrities and politicians despite this. But showing all these Faunus who really don’t encounter a lot of systemic oppression while reducing all the horrors to background lore gives off the impression that nothing about the lives of the Faunus is made meaningfully harder by virtue of systemic racism. “But Doubleca5t” you might say “What about Velvet? She gets bullied for being a Faunus.” Well the issue with that is...

3) The Faunus discrimination we’re shown implies that the bigotry they face is personal, not systemic. There are very few instances where we see a Faunus actually encounter bigotry, but the issue is, these examples don’t really carry much weight because the source of the problem in these instances is just a few racist individuals rather than any kind of structure or institution. Cardin and his team bully Velvet, but then they also bully Jaune, so we don’t really get a sense that the student body has a racism problem, just that Cardin is a dickhead. A drunk guy yells some racist stuff at Blake in V7, but he’s just some drunk asshole, what reason do we have to think he’s reflective of any broader societal attitudes in Atlas? Seeing Faunus discrimination in RWBY would give you the same impression about racism in Remnant that a lot of liberals have about racism in America: that because all the discriminatory laws have already been abolished, racism isn’t any kind of structural or societal problem and is simply an issue of personal bias. And similar to the average liberal, this means you probably won’t see it as a serious problem that needs addressing.

TL;DR: RWBY wants you to believe that the Faunus are an oppressed minority that faces rampant systemic racism, but the actual content of the show fails to convey this in a way that feels impactful. The writers simply tell you that the Faunus are an oppressed minority and ask you to take their word for it.