#low key could have paralleled Raven if they’d wanted to go that route

[spittyfishy]

Duchess has just such a pretty design, I love her 🦢💜

[itsclydebitches]

A lot of people’s justification for Ruby lying is, “It wasn’t about their personal connection to Ironwood! It was the state of Mantle and how they’d suffer if he took the truth badly, and two people he knows (Qrow and Weiss) were shocked about the state of Mantle! They cared more about Mantle than someone they knew.” I feel that’s kinda fair, but what’s your take on that?

I think it would indeed be fair it it were true. However, simplifying Ruby’s lies down to “She cares about Mantle” ignores a whole slew of important things, including but not limited to: 

What something looks like and what something is are often two separate things. Mantle may indeed look bad, but Ironwood has reasons for decisions like armed men and curfews - AKA, when you’re living in a city continually threatened by monsters you sometimes need to lay down rules to keep people safe. At the risk of drawing some comparisons between RWBY and real life scenarios, insert “Yes you have to wear a mask” and “No you can’t hold parties right now” parallels here. The “Ironwood is infringing on Mantle’s freedom!” cry from fans when Ironwood says people have to go inside because there are literally grimm, serial killers, and Salem’s men running about sounds a lot like the “You’re infringing on my freedom!” cries when officials say you can’t hold a graduation party during a pandemic. These are very low-key sacrifices made to keep everyone safe and no, we may not like them and yes, they may indeed be causing other problems (embargo/close businesses both equal severe financial difficulties) but it’s better than being dead. Most importantly for this conversation, these justifications were explained and/or made clear to RWBYJNR after they landed, which should have changed their initial, knee-jerk reaction of “Oh my god Mantle looks terrible!” It’s a matter of acknowledging that yeah, Mantle isn’t in a good place right now but that’s because the world isn’t in a good place either. We’re trying to survive.

“But the reason Mantle is in so much danger is because of a hole in the wall and that hole is there because Ironwood is using resources! He’s the bad guy here.” That ignores that Ironwood isn’t just stealing resources for the hell of it (he’s trying to stop Salem), and that our good guy Robyn didn’t fix the hole with what she stole those resources back, and that someone like Weiss could have plugged it up in a second... but even if we put all that aside, this just makes Ruby look worse. If she really cared about Mantle she would tell Ironwood, “Hey, the resources you’re taking? You should give them back because your plan won’t work. I know this for a fact because of the information I kept from you.” Ruby speaking up would have done the most to help Mantle there and then. Instead she pushes Ironwood to continue with Amity for reasons the story fails to make clear. It just insists that telling the world about Salem is automatically a Good Thing, despite the story simultaneously only providing evidence to the contrary. 

If Ruby cared about Mantle why doesn’t she decide to tell Ironwood everything in some effort to help them? Why wasn’t that the catalyst? Instead she decides to tell him after he’s agreed to follow their lead about telling the council everything (with, again, no good explanation as to why Ruby thinks telling everyone about Salem is the way to go - while she’s struggling to tell Ironwood this no less!) She decides to be more open with Ironwood only once Ironwood listens to her and takes more of a backseat position to her leadership. The story spends far too much time insisting that Ruby’s perspective is the objectively good perspective without explaining why that’s the case, which makes her decisions read less like “Ruby is actually doing good in the world” and far more like “Ruby just wants people to do what she says, regardless of whether what she’s asking for makes any sense or it truly the best route to take.” Connected to this, why doesn’t Ruby consider the lives of all the Mantle evacuees when she refuses to let Ironwood get them to safety? Her actions throughout the volume do nothing to tell me she actually cares about these people, nor that she’s willing to make sacrifices in order to truly help them. 

“Ruby doesn’t know how Ironwood will react” - That’s a legit worry, but the story acts as if Ruby is some genius strategist for coming up with that concern, rather than acknowledging that this is the exact same reason Ozpin had for keeping those secrets: What if whoever hears it reacts horribly? The difference between them is that Ozpin has objective evidence to support that worry - Raven, Lionheart, those who have betrayed him in the past - whereas Ruby does not. Ironwood has held it together through years of knowing about Salem, the Fall of Beacon, losing Ozpin, etc. He’s done a great deal to demonstrate that he will no buckle under pressure. So it’s a matter of that hypocrisy. Last volume Ruby essentially said, “I deserve to know everything Ozpin is keeping from me despite having done incredibly little to prove my loyalty or my resilience to hearing horrifying news. How I might react to this information is not a legitimate enough concern to bar me from having it.” About four days later she now says, “Ironwood does not deserve to know everything we’re keeping him despite having done an incredible amount to prove his loyalty as well as his resilience to hearing horrifying news. How he might react to this information is a major concern and it will bar him from receive it. Uncle Qrow is right - I’m not anything like Ozpin.” Ruby forced someone to “trust” her in a truly horrendous fashion and then refused to extend that trust herself once she’d gotten what she wanted. That has nothing to do with Mantle and everything to do with Ruby’s (the story’s) belief that she’s just intrinsically better than others. 

There are other issues as well - such as the fact that the writing bypassed Qrow, Weiss, and Yang’s emotional connection to Ironwood entirely. Their reactions don’t tell us that they care more about Mantle than Ironwood because those reactions don’t engage with Ironwood as an individual at all. The writing simply ignores those aspects of the situation, attempting to remove them from the equation entirely - but these are the biggest points: 1. We don’t see Ruby actually caring for Mantle, 2. We don’t see Ruby doing things that benefit Mantle, and 3. Ruby’s justification for (supposedly) prioritizing Mantle over Ironwood requires a severe amount of mental gymnastics given the events just a few days ago - and then the story doesn’t acknowledge that in any meaningful way. 

“Ruby is helping Mantle” is just a nice-sounding way of absolving her of her mistakes this volume, but imo it doesn’t hold up when you examine what she does and why she does it.