#rwby combat analysis

[supersaiyanjedi14]

RWBY COMBAT ANALYSIS: THE RUSTED KNIGHT

“I’m sorry, I… I know I’m not okay. I- I’m not right, but… How am I supposed to be…? I’ve been alone… for SO… LONG! Here… On that bridge… I was the only one that could do it! I was the ONLY ONE! And I… And now I have to live with that forever… In here or back home…”

PHYSICAL

After falling into the Ever After during the Atlas exodus, Jaune Arc stumbled across a Clockwork Orange, an item that forcibly sent him back in time.  Unable to return to the present, Jaune was forced to spend the subsequent years braving the dangers of the Ever After as he awaited Team RWBY to finally join him, eventually taking up the alias of the Rusted Knight, a supposedly fantastical character of the fairy tale The Girl Who Fell Through the World.  By the time he finally reunited with his friends, Jaune had spent anywhere from ten to twenty years in the Ever After, placing him in his early-to-late thirties during the events of Volume 9.  While ostensibly still in his physical prime, Jaune’s aging was far from graceful, his blonde hair and beard streaked with gray and his weathered features betraying the trials of his tenure.  His mental strain was even more pronounced, his failure to revive Penny Polendina driving him into an obsessive preoccupation with protecting those around him, latching on to keeping the Paper Pleasers intact despite their frequent attempts at Ascension.

Despite his premature aging, Jaune still retained his athletic viability as the Rusted Knight, continuing to demonstrate his exceptional strength and agility.  His physical might was sufficient to overpower Jabberwalkers on a fairly regular basis and even stagger the Curious Cat with physical combat after the creature possessed the body of Neopolitan.  While still disinclined to employ acrobatics, Rusted Jaune was quick on his feet, covering ground with running charges and employing balanced footwork and evasions to keep his target in his crosshairs.  Furthermore, he grew into an exceptional equestrian and mounted warrior, expertly working alongside his jackalope mount Juniper on multiple occasions.  Though he failed to catch the Curious Cat before it could possess Neo’s body and was later overpowered by the Furious Cat, this is no sign of weakness in either area given the Afteran’s overwhelming physical might.  Where Jaune's athletic performance differed the most was in his dexterity and reflexes, something he was forced to develop in response to his damaged weapon and no doubt honed by his experience in the Ever After.  With a much shorter blade than he was used to, Jaune was forced to rely more on technique and precision when fighting than brute force, targeting the weakest link and striking accurately.

Regarding Jaune's physical tolerances, he remained an extremely capable endurance fighter, focusing through hits and continuing to fight afterwards.  During the battle with the Curious Cat, Jaune soaked up several major hits from the Cat and was later accidentally hurled from the arena by Weiss, yet he was only minorly disabled by this, regaining his feet and continuing to provide tactical support for Weiss, Blake and Yang.  It was only after the Cat transformed into the Furious Cat, it’s exceptionally more powerful form, and struck Jaune square in the chest that his Aura broke and he was out of the fight.  During his time as the Rusted Knight, he was noted for multiple harrowing adventures that tested his mettle, and he was even able to survive being poisoned by Alyx despite having little in the way of medical attention.  However, Jaune's stamina was surprisingly cut short in his elder state.  While he did not burn out immediately, he was still subdued at the Tree far quicker than his allies, his Aura breaking before any of theirs had even flickered.  Far more detrimental was Jaune’s mental fortitude.  While his will to persevere and fight remained indominable, his previous failures left him with an obsession with protecting his charges, leaving him anxious and prone to angered outbursts.  However, despite his limited composure, the Rusted Knight retained his dogged determination even when under duress, and pushing him to the point of no return would be an uphill battle for anyone.

Despite the severe state of disrepair it had fallen into, Jaune’s armor remained strong and effective, and had in fact been further supplemented with additional plating.  The cuirass was upgraded to provide greater coverage over his abdomen, while his pauldrons were replaced with a heavier set, though the gauntlets remained unchanged.  He added to this with a full helmet, greaves, tassets, and a codpiece, under which he wore a gambeson and beige trousers.

RANKING: Tier 2, Peak Human Fitness

Despite his less than graceful aging and deteriorating mental health, the Rusted Knight has not actually underperformed significantly in the realm of physical ability, and he still solidly qualifies for Peak Human Fitness.  He is a battle-hardened endurance fighter who leverages his strongest attributes for maximum effect, supplementing his grounded stalwart posture with solid mobility and top-notch equipment.  In fact, I'd argue that Jaune’s upgraded armor serves as a solid compromise for his undercut stamina and discipline by bolstering his native durability.  The Rusted Knight may be at greater risk of breaking than he once was, but the only way to put him down would be to shatter him completely.

MARTIAL

As the Rusted Knight, Jaune Arc continued to carry Crocea Mors as his primary weapon, but time and damage had taken a significant toll on it.  The blade of the sword was snapped in half as a result of his confrontation with Cinder Fall, reducing its length to barely over a foot.  Far more noticeable was the severe degree of rust and wear on the blade and shield, with numerous pits and scratches had made their way into the metal.  However, despite this long-term damage, the weapon set retained its combative reliability, as the sword remained sharp enough to dispatch Jaune’s opponents, while the mechanisms allowing the shield to convert into Jaune’s scabbard remained unaffected.  Overall, looks are deceiving, and Crocea Mors remains a lethal killing tool.

When analyzing the Rusted Knight’s capabilities as a martial artist, it is important to note both the substantial degree of development he attained and the significant trade off in his skill configuration.  Due to being thrust back in time, Jaune was forced to spend anywhere from ten to twenty years contending with the dangers of the Ever After, a grinding trial by fire that went a long way towards compensating for his most significant weakness prior to Volume 9, his inexperience and lack of development.  While the reliability and details of Lewis’s recounts of Jaune in The Girl Who Fell Through the World has not been established, even a conservative assessment would place the Rusted Knight as comparable to many of the most experienced and skilled Huntsmen on Remnant.  However, between his damaged weapon and limited resources, Jaune was forced to heavily reconfigure his fighting style to compensate, resulting in a similar but very different combatant compared to what he was beforehand.  Fortunately, the aforementioned decades of isolation gave Jaune plenty of time to refine his new style with his limitations in mind, and his developed skill upon reuniting with Team RWBY was, at bare minimum, comparable to theirs.  Despite the handicaps imposed on him by his weapon, Jaune’s technique remained similar in its core ingredients; a grounded defense-and-counter oriented fighter who leverages physical ability through simple and direct swordplay.  He retained a stalwart grounded posture in his footwork, eschewing acrobatics for sidesteps and evasions.  Where the differences presented itself were in the defense/offense balance.  Rusted Jaune displayed a much stronger offensive component in his style, alternating between shield blocks and sword strikes far more actively.  To compensate for his shorter blade, Jaune adjusted his swordplay to perform swifter and tighter slashes and stabs, getting in close before laying into the target.  The most significant additions to Jaune’s skill set were his expanded use of his weapons, his integration of hand-to-hand combat techniques, and his proficiency as a mounted warrior.  He swapped techniques for his sword and shield, warding parries for the former and shield bashes with the latter, using the weapon set to mor effectively maintain offensive pressure while maintaining defensive coverage.  Though still not a committed unarmed fighter, Jaune was more than willing to throw hands in battle, staggering the Curious Cat with sweeping kicks and headbutts.  His strong bond with Juniper allowed him to coordinate and utilize her for multiple combative purposes, from tackling targets to serving as a cushion to safeguard her master.

While Jaune’s deteriorating mental health made him an anxious wreck in the grand scheme of things, they did nothing to diminish his capabilities as a tactician and strategist.  He continued to demonstrate his strong aptitude for tactical analysis and coordinating with his allies, adjusting his approach to suit the opponent and exploit circumstantial factors.  When confronting the various Jabberwalkers summoned by Neopolitan, Jaune focused on repelling the creatures and warding off their advance before turning around to counter.  Against the Curious Cat at the Tree, Jaune quickly deduced the hallucinogenic effects of its leaves and ordered Weiss, Blake and Yang to set fire to them, forcibly expelling the Cat from Neo’s body.  In single combat, Jaune applied these same tactics to endure the opponent’s assault before retaliating, seizing the initiative rather than passively responding.  However, where Jaune previously relied on the integration of his Dust gadgets to break the opponent’s advance, he now opted for abrupt alternation between offensive and defensive movements, pressuring the opponent while still maintaining coverage.  He will break off to defend if need be, but he will not stop advancing.  What Vomit Boy achieved through leaning on alternative equipment, the Rusted Knight achieved through tested and developed technique.

However, while Jaune’s new approach was more developed overall, it also came at the expense of the versatility he displayed in his youth.  With his damaged weapon and limited-to-unapplicable alternative tools, Jaune’s style and tactics were ultimately centered around leveraging his core technique for maximum effect.  Jaune’s style may have been flexible, but it was also very singular and direct; what you see is what you get.  Additionally, Jaune’s emotional instability manifested itself most profoundly in a resurgence of his youthful recklessness.  Disturbed by his failure to save Penny during the exodus, Jaune became obsessed with protecting his chosen charges from everything around them, including themselves.  Aside from patronizing the Paper Pleasers, this mentality led to Jaune overexerting himself and biting off more than he could chew, his refusal to stop advancing stemming from a pathological unwillingness to give up.  Where Jaune’s Beacon humbling motivated him to pace himself and fight smart, his Atlas failures compelled him to run himself ragged in a misguided effort to keep fighting.  As seen in the Cat’s Penny and Pyrrha illusions, this failure to take a more measured approach fed into a weakness to more subversive tricks and distractions, ironically making him vulnerable to the very tactics he once employed himself.

RANKING: Tier 3: Standard Mastery

While Jaune’s failures as the Rusted Knight seem to point to a middling level of effectiveness, his improvements and experience still more than qualify him for a Tier 3 ranking.  He is a gritty, battle-hardened warrior whose style had been developed and honed into a far more complete package than he once employed, and he remains a highly capable tactical thinker when he puts his mind to it.  Jaune’s problem, like many Standard Masters, is that he has fallen into the trap of going through the motions, basically doing the same thing again and again in every battle when dropped in cold.  To be fair to Jaune, this is more the result of a limited arsenal and lack of comparable enemies rather than damaging oversights.  The baseline reliability of his style and approach cannot be denied; he simply hasn’t meshed it with the versatility he used to have.  Regardless, the fact that he came closer to killing the Curious Cat than anyone else tells me that his fabled reputation is very well-earned.

SPECIAL

And now for the part of this analysis that I’ve been dreading, that being the assessment of the Rusted Knight’s special abilities and powers.  This is the area where Jaune’s development is most unclear simply because, aside from a few uses of his gravity Dust, we never really saw him do anything in Volume 9.  He never explicitly used Aura Amp on screen, and the times he used his Dust could be counted on the fingers of one hand.  This is especially odd given Jaune’s ready use of his abilities prior to falling into the Ever After, especially in conjunction with his martial skills.  However, I do believe that both discrepancies can be reasonably inferred given context.  Firstly, it must be remembered that Jaune’s last recorded attempt to use his Semblance was on Penny Polendina, whose injuries he was utterly incapable of healing.  Given his failure to save Penny was arguably the single strongest contributor to his psychological breakdown in his isolation, it follows that his confidence in his abilities was shattered, and he unconsciously avoided using his powers due to the weight of that failure.  While I don’t believe Jaune’s proficiency with his Semblance truly atrophied, I also don’t believe he developed his powers beyond what he could do in the Atlas saga.  As far as his Dust is concerned, I see his limited use being identical to the limitations of his sword, that being logistical shortages.  There is no evidence that Dust exists in the Ever After, much less the incredibly rare synthetic hard-light variety that powered his shield panels.  With nothing to replenish his stores should his shield get damaged, it’s plausible that Jaune refrained from using his Dust unless he absolutely had to, conserving a non-renewable resource and otherwise relying on physical combat.

However, this isn’t to say that Rusted Knight Jaune has no ethereal talents to speak of.  He did in fact continue to utilize his gravity Dust repulsor in combat, and like his martial skills, his fluidity with it had clearly improved with practice.  Previously, Jaune would simply use the pressure wave from a static position, allowing the shield to do most of the heavy lifting.  Now, Jaune demonstrated a far more active defense, combining the gravity waves with sweeping shield bashes.  Though never outright stated, I believe this technique allowed Jaune to slightly enhance the overall power of the repulsor’s push, getting more bang for his buck.  Additionally, Jaune continued to demonstrate his talent for combining his powers and skills together with one another.  Aside from the basic offensive applications, Jaune also showcased an ability to use his Dust to drive his other weapons, seen when he bounced his sword off the shield to turn it into a projectile against Neo’s clone Jabberwalkers.  These new applications further showcased Jaune compensating for his limited arsenal with greater skill and refinement, sacrificing output in favor of control.

Now, normally I like to stay with concrete information rather than headcanons, but I do believe there may be evidence that Jaune did in fact use his Semblance at specific points in Volume 9, and both of my theoretical examples do speak to him still displaying great skill and power.  Hear me out;

During his early travels with Alyx, Lewis and the Curious Cat, the Cat poisoned Jaune in order to get him off his back and sow distrust between him and the children.  While Jaune’s physical fortitude certainly played a role in his survival, the Curious Cat is not a figure that comes across as leaving a job half-finished.  Given that Aura Amp’s most obvious application was accelerating Aura’s healing properties, it is entirely possible that Jaune’s survival owed itself in part to using his Semblance to help purge the toxin from his body.  Later, during the battle at the Tree, Jaune was confronted with a vision of Alyx after being blasted from the arena.  While this episode was mostly a mental battle forcing Jaune to confront his demons, the flash of light that immediately preceded Jaune breaking out of the vision could have very well been Jaune using Aura Amp to dispel the effects of the smoke.  Assuming I’m right, then this could arguably make Jaune’s use of his Semblance even more potent than before, as dispelling drugs and poisons is easily an incredibly useful talent to have that goes well beyond fixing broken bones.

RANKING: Tier 3: Specialized Combat

Even if my supposition is 100% on the money, it does not significantly change the Rusted Knight’s standing as an ethereal fighter, given his hypothetical applications are so few, far between, and limited to utility.  That said, Jaune’s use of his gravity Dust more than makes up for it.  His applications are not only just as calculated and powerful as they used to be, they are also far more technically sophisticated and pair up much better with his fighting skills.  His only real limitation, as in other areas, is that he lacks versatility, and his more skillful use of his power still mostly amounts to a directly offensive ability that can only do so much.  Jaune may lack the variety he used to have, but the far greater skill he has with the powers he still has firmly establishes him as a force to be reckoned with.

OVERALL RANKING: TIER 3, ADVANCED HUNTSMAN

As in his youth, Rusted Knight Jaune Arc’s overall ranking is determined by his martial skills and special abilities, showcasing both his high improvement and the limitations he still suffers from.  In all areas, Jaune is performing on a very high level, but his methodology is centered on direct application rather than the balanced versatility he used to showcase.  In many ways, I consider Jaune’s most direct analogue in this state to be James Ironwood.  Both are aging heavyweights who leverage their strength and fortitude for maximum effect, both are grounded heavy-handed fighters who focus on maintaining a heavy stalwart advance, and both leverage their special abilities and powers as direct supplements to their offensive advance.  They are powerful battlefield operatives who make full use of all the tools in their arsenals, but their approach is based on the direct application of power, not tactical considerations.  By operating as a one-man crusader in the Ever After, Jaune got so good at what he was doing that he simply couldn’t loose, leaving holes in his skill set and tactics unaddressed because they simply never came up.

Jaune’s greatest strength and weakness as the Rusted Knight is that his previously broad skill set has been significantly reduced, forcing him to throw all of his eggs into one basket to compensate.  The result is a tradeoff.  On the one hand, his fighting method is blessed with a substantially greater degree of developed skill by way of his combat experience, and he effectively blends them together into a singular, high-performance technique.  But on the other hand, this also means that he no longer has the versatility he used to have, relying on a singular method rather than balancing out between his options.  He is skilled and powerful enough to capably overcome the vast majority of challengers, but it also means he could get into trouble very quickly if confronted by someone his style is poorly suited to engage. 

As with most things, this ties directly into Jaune’s mental state as the Rusted Knight.  Between his traumatic experiences, forced isolation, and fixation on preventing the same failure all over again, Jaune simply fell into the motions and got into the habit of doing the same thing over and over again.  This may have been an okay coping mechanism at first, but there is a stark difference between dedication and obsession.  He never really diversified because, not only did he never really need to, but he couldn’t bring himself to do so since he was convinced that he was doing the only right thing he could.  Fortunately, unlike Ironwood, Jaune’s self-destructive stubbornness was the result of improper healing rather than arrogance, and he was the first to admit that he wasn’t in the right headspace to be the hero he was trying to be.  As with the rest of his life, Jaune’s friends were there to pick him up, setting him on the path to properly heal.  Whatever Jaune’s status as a warrior may be upon his return to Remnant, he will at the very least be on the fast track to achieving a healthier self-actualization, and finally move on from his trauma.  The Rusted Knight may not have been the hero, but Jaune Arc still may be.

* images taken from RWBY Wiki and @talia-pumpkinwand*

[bestworstcase]

Something I've been chewing on that I do wonder if you have any thoughts on. What is the intended characterization/symbolism of Yang's semblance. Jaune is a healer/support. Ren learned to control his emotions and then grew empathetic. Qrow has his bad luck which is probably a defense mechanism with consequences from the bandits that raised him and Raven. Taiyang's description of Yang's semblance is the closest to an analysis the audience has gotten and that is - "basically a Temper Tantrum". Very interestingly the narrative has so far let that description stand uncontested. And I believe you were the one that did the analysis that Yang's problem was overly depending upon her semblance as a finisher. Also fun to consider how one of the ways that Yang has her parallel with Cinder is with the fire association... which for Yang is just actually her preferred ammunition and the go to imagery for her songs that I can recall off the top of my head except for temper metaphors.

that was me yeah

a core theme of yang’s character is that she’s made of contradictions and cannot be easily defined or fit into a single box. this is true of every character in rwby—there’s always more than meets the eye, complexity beneath the surface—but yang as a character is subject to other characters’ struggle to parse who she is. tai sees a temper tantrum, ruby sees invulnerability, blake has been on an emotional journey spanning six volumes of just learning to see and love yang’s whole, complete self. yang is raven’s daughter, after all—but she’s also summer’s daughter so much that the resemblance screams itself out of the screen.

so. her semblance.

in the story, it’s been described three different times by three different characters:

ruby: “every hit makes her stronger, and she uses that to fight back. that’s what makes her special”

tai: “basically a temper tantrum, great in a bind, but it won’t always save you”

blake: “his semblance is like yours, he absorbs energy through his sword, stores it up and sends it back when he’s ready” (+ yang feeling it’s “cheap” that he “gets to dish out damage without feeling it”)

<- three bears.

in goldilocks terms, yang’s semblance is “too strong” (ruby sees her as invulnerable), “too weak” (tai sees the power it grants her as essentially hollow, false) and “just right” (yang is neither invulnerable nor fragile and her semblance is just a part of her). i also think that what yang says of adam’s semblance is more revealing of her own self-perception than necessarily being meant as an objective critique of adam—it’s not “cheap” to parry/riposte and in fact yang’s growth as a combatant post-beacon looks like learning to fight more defensively and evasively, less reliant on soaking up damage/power for explosive finishers.

insofar as there’s a meaningful difference between adam needing to block hits vs yang not it’s that yang’s semblance gives her a bit of a cushion—she can still riposte even if she misses the parry—and in all honesty i think probably comes down to their kit. yang is a hand-to-hand fighter. she’s blocking hits with her forearms and, gauntlets or not, she’s going to feel that. the specific damage-absorption mechanics of their semblances cater to their fighting styles.

but, yang feels that it’s “cheap” for adam to absorb energy through his sword rather than his own body, because yang takes a certain pride in being able to get back up after being knocked down. her idea that she must take damage before she can deal it back twice as hard is probably not a real, immutable characteristic of her semblance but something that developed in response to how yang herself copes with trauma—it’s a way of, i think, regaining a sense of control and security by telling herself that it’s okay if bad things happen because it will just make her stronger in the end.

the narrative challenges this way of thinking post-beacon—losing her arm and being left behind did not make yang stronger, receiving support from trusted adults like oobleck and port and reuniting with her friends/family is what made her stronger. learning to accept help and treat herself with more compassion is making her stronger. exploring who she is apart from ruby is making her stronger. this is the direction she’s growing in emotionally—that being hurt doesn’t make her strong, healing makes her strong—and her use of her semblance is shifting in tandem with that (still pops it as a finisher quite often but it is pretty rare since v6 that yang uses it to gain the upper hand in fights she’s at risk of losing, bc these days she’s more focused on evasion/outmaneuvering opponents to create openings for her semblance to end the fight)

and then it’s connected to yang’s anger (and fear, as when she gets between neo and ruby) because both the feelings and the semblance are in essence a self-protective response—yang gets angry when she or someone she cares about is hurt and uses that anger to protect herself and/or the person she loves. her semblance is about taking painful things that happen to her and transmuting that into the power to defend herself. same thing.

i don’t actually think that her semblance is hooked into her anger in the, like, mechanical sense (we’ve definitely seen her pop the semblance in context where she’s having a GREAT time, for one)—the correlation arises from yang’s anger being motivated by protectiveness and a desire to not be hurt, which is also what manifests in her semblance.

i would argue that “basically a temper tantrum” is meant to be read in context with ruby’s “that’s what makes her special” and then both those extremes are brought to a resolution by blake’s neutral description of what burn is, mechanically; in that sense i don’t think that tai’s analysis has been left uncontested except insofar as yang didn’t argue with him—but conversely, tai more or less tells her to think of her semblance as a risky weapon of last resort and yang went “k” and started using her semblance more, so i think it’s less that yang takes his advice at face value than it is yang recognizing that tai raises a generally good point [being creative and flexible is valuable] and thinking okay, i can probably get more out of my semblance if i try new things.

her position is that burn is normal (“how is me using my semblance different from someone else using theirs?”), and the way she takes this advice on board reflects that—if someone else relied on their semblance for just one specific tactic and nothing else, what advice would they be getting from their instructors? push yourself further, test the limits of what you think you can do, get out of your comfort zone. that’s what winter tells weiss when she’s struggling! that’s how RNJR are taught in v5! tai views burn as fundamentally different from other semblances, and his advice really comes down to “don’t rely on it, you don’t need it.” but yang disregards that part of what he tells her entirely. she quietly sorts through what tai tells her and only keeps what she thinks will actually help her improve—which is, in itself, of a piece with her semblance. she takes the ‘hit’—the harsh and rather unfair criticism—and then filters/converts it into something more constructive.

(there is also some interesting subtext here with the protective/self-protective drive behind both yang’s anger and her semblance and tai’s perception that the semblance is a “temper tantrum”—which aside from framing burn itself as abnormal also casts yang’s anger as irrational, childish, out-of-control. given the dynamic of yang’s childhood situation, the parentification and leaving yang and ruby alone at home for extended periods of time and over-identification of yang with raven plus favoritism toward ruby… and factoring in tai referring to yang’s anxiety and post-traumatic depression as “moping” well. across the board he seems either unwilling or unable to seriously/genuinely engage with yang’s feelings so how much of his perception that yang has “temper tantrums” follows from outbursts she had when overwhelmed as a child or young teen that tai didn’t take seriously or chose to ignore rather than deal with the root cause of neglect/trauma?)

[waheelawhisperer]

If I could add my own two cents on the whole "Yang's amputation was a punishment for a moral failing" debacle, can I just say how much I hate it's counterpart "Yang undergoes enough character development that she doesn't need to be punished with amputation to learn her lesson"?

Because let me tell you, it's really freaking annoying how EVERY fic that diverges before the Fall of Beacon saves Yang's arm.

I am SO glad that Yang's an amputee in the upcoming movie! Maybe now people will stop erasing that part of her character in fics!

Okay, so, I had to think about this one a bit. I'll give you fair warning right now that you probably won't like everything I have to say.

To start with, claiming that Yang losing an arm is related to a character flaw or that her amputation is a punishment for some failing real or imagined is stupid, gross, and factually incorrect. I've made many, many posts about how Yang actually behaved correctly in that situation, that her injuries were not her fault, and that she was caught in a scenario where her best option was a low-percentage play that ended up not working. I'm not doing it again. I'm tired of this conversation. Anyone who doesn't understand this at this point is cognitively equivalent to the roadkill I saw on my way to work this morning and would be better suited to using their empty skulls to store and dispense bingo balls than engaging in literary analysis. Recapping my arguments will not convince anyone new.

I think RWBY made a very bold and powerful choice to have one of the main characters lose a limb in combat. I hate it on a personal level because Yang is my baby and I can't stand to see her hurt, but when I divorce my emotions from the decision and consider it objectively, I think it's actually one of the best and most effective choices RWBY has ever made. Any negative reaction I feel about this decision is purely emotional and stems from my extreme protectiveness of Yang in particular. If they'd done it to any other character, it wouldn't bother me at all.

As a result, it probably isn't surprising that I don't have an inherent problem with fan content that averts the loss of Yang's arm. I understand why you do, and why others do, and I recognize and acknowledge the validity of those feelings. I do think that at least some people within the RWBY community downplay Yang's disability for ableist reasons, whether consciously or not.

I think it's fine for fanfics and so on to arrange things so that Yang doesn't lose her arm. One of the great things about fanfic and other fan content is that it allows the people making it to explore alternate paths or aspects of canon and to ask themselves how events would have unfolded if something had been done differently. Fanfics aren't obligated to follow the stations of canon if the author doesn't want them to. What is even the point of writing a story, if we're just retreading everything that happened in canon with no significant changes? To me, writing a fic where Yang doesn't lose her arm is no different from writing a fic where Pyrrha survives or Ironwood manages to avoid going off the deep end.

That said, I think you have a great point about how common it is for fics to avert the loss of Yang's arm. I don't think there's anything wrong with any individual fic simply setting Yang on a different path, one where she doesn't lose her arm, but if it's happening often enough in aggregate, then we have a problem. I don't know if that is the case or not. I don't read fanfiction often enough to be able to identify common trends within it. Most fanfiction either does not meet my standards for quality, lacks a premise I find sufficiently appealing, or both, so I will defer to the knowledge of others regarding how RWBY fanfiction as a whole treats Yang's canon disability.

I'll be honest, all of the stories I have in any stage of completion arrange events so that Yang avoids permanent physical injury of any kind. I tried to write a scene where she lost her arm, I really did, but I couldn't do it. It made me cry and I had to scrap it. I can, just barely, write a fight scene where she gets the absolute crap beaten out of her and nearly dies as long as she can somehow be healed from it without long-term consequences, but that's all I can manage. I can kill other characters. I can put them through one hell of a lot of misery. I can't do it to her. She's the only one I can't do it to.

I don't give a shit about the Justice League movie. I'm not sufficiently emotionally invested in it to have an opinion about any writing or design choice the people making it made. Sorry.

[megashadowdragon]

jaune will do something that angers salem

as we all know jaune and ruby are foils

why do I think so

hawkeyedflame . tumblr . com/post/152581160728/on-rubys-elusive-character-development-or-why

“ jaune is a foil To Ruby. She’s a prodigy who quickly became a deadly warrior at a young age and is welcomed into Beacon two years early as a result while Jaune is a hard worker who progresses slowly and had to lie his way into Beacon because of his nonexistent combat background. Ruby is a strategist specialized on pre-defined team attacks and wields a self-made weapon capable of long range combat. Jaune is a tactician specialized in creating new team attacks according to his analysis on the battlefield and wields a family heirloom only capable of close range combat. Ruby has a rather broken family but they fully support her decision to become a huntress while Jaune’s family is large and united but they don’t support his choices nor have any faith on him. Ruby is a tomboy who dominates the battlefield but doesn’t enjoy dancing whereas Jaune tends to act girly and is initially terrible at fighting but also a great dancer. The more you look into them as a pair, the more contrasts that can be spotted in the details.”

jaune has a more “feminine way of dealing with emotions” while ruby has the more masculine way of dealing with emotions

aminoapps . com/c/rwby/page/blog/why-its-good-for-jaunes-semblance-to-be-a-support-type/xpp7_XQ4s2u6RGX2zboa6JwM2XMekWGZd68

“Joan of Arc is known for breaking gender stereotypes about what it meant to be a woman. And if you think about it in a lot of ways Jaune doesn’t fit into the stereotypical “man box.” We are don’t “men don’t cry.” He wears his emotions on his sleeve. While in the real world men (and in the world of RWBY BOTH men and women ARGUABLY) are told to be strong. And that many people superficially equate physical strength with heroism (Raven?) it is fitting that Jaune’s semblance doesn’t so much doesn’t so much empower himself, as it empowers others. (as well as himself but its more effective on others in the team since they are more skilled than him) The so called “Feminine” strength.” P.S. Hmm as a follow-up to my The Importance Of Foils Part 2 post. I think that Ruby, despite being a girl, fits into the “man box” better than anyone else including it’s UNHEALTHY WAYS OF DEALING WITH EMOTIONS. The only difference is on remnant, it’s not because a man doesn’t cry. But because “a hero doesn’t cry.”

ruby first activated her silver eyes leading to her to learn about them when she saw pyrrha jaunes partner impaled by cinder and burnt to ash failing to save pyrrha  her awakening being in reaction to her death while jaune activated his semblance and realized what it was when he saw rubys partner weiss  impaled by cinder and  was able to save her  life awakening his semblance to do so allowing him to learn what his semblance was ( which is a good example this is an example of them being foils  and how its been shown and effected their storys )

cinder is jaunes endgame  while salem is rubys

right now cinder has been solely focused on ruby due to the grudge since v3 while dismissing jaune

salem dismisses ruby so it would fit as a contrast for her to be pissed off at jaune and focus on him especially since salem is named after the salem witch trials and jaune is based off joan of arc who was burnt at the stake for “witchcraft) which is often associated with the salem witch trials

@thehtg-therealone

[gstud]

Pyrrha V.S. Cinder Combat Analysis

Alright so with this post I'm going to be reviewing the fight between Cinder and Pyrrha, so let's get this show on the road.

In my opinion Pyrrha should've won the fight but just barely given that cinder has the fall maiden's power. Now what we know about Pyrrha: in volume one when we're being introduced to characters and such Weiss goes on an exposition dump talking about Pyrrha and how accomplished she is as a combatant "Pyrrha graduated top of her class at sanctum... she's won the Mystral Regional Tournament four years in a row, a new record." That's pretty damn impressive, so much so that Pyrrha in volume two says that she's on such a high pedestal that she's unapproachable.

Then later we've seen in multiple seasons, most notably volume three, of how well she fights holding her own very efficiently against two fighters (volume 3 episode 2). Her main advantage over all of her opponents has always been polarity which we've seen her use minorly when she fought Mercury and then majorly when she fought Penny (R.I.P.) but when she's fighting Cinder she can't use her polarity with Cinder's weapons because their made of some sort of stone/glass, I like to lean towards obsidian (obsidian comes from a volcano so does cinders from burnt wildlife, not all that important though). While Pyrrha can't use her polarity against her weapons she can use it on her environment which we saw, which I thought was very effective. That's enough about Pyrrha, we're gonna now focus on Cinder which may be a bit more difficult to talk about seeing how we have limited information about her.

So we know that Cinder is working with Salem who has some control over grimm, so Salem could've taught Cinder how to fight or how to think through a fight (though I'm a bit reluctant to think that because I think Salem is just using Cinder as a pawn) so there's that, we also know that she is very cunning in the way of planning out the Fall of Beacon and recruiting people to her cause (ie, Mercury, Emerald, Roman, the White Fang) again adding onto her tactical experience which is all said and good but tactics can't win a battle alone.

Combatively she has taken out a lobby of Atlas grunts, which I'm sure any huntsman can do so, eh ok that happened, then she has the successful mugging of the fall maiden which is definitely impressive though she wouldn't have been able to do it on her own, so for the most part she excels at guerrilla warfare, hit and runs. As for her fight with Ozpin, idk what to make of it there was no body to be found and we only saw them clashing so Ozpin could've slipped away via some magic bullshit or she did kill the body Ozpin was using but then jumped hosts we don't know, but I will give her this: from what we did see of the fight it seemed like she had to go all out to at least keep up with Ozpin which can lead to exhaustion.

Now to the actual fight itself, finally. So the overall fight itself was good, it was exciting, both dishing out damage pretty evenly throughout but there were two moments, maybe three, where Pyrrha could've ended the fight or kept on fighting.

So this moment was perfect to continue on fighting rather than being at a stalemate. Pyrrha obviously is overpowering Cinder in this position even if she can't finish it with her sword she can still turn and throw Cinder into the ground with a hip toss and at that point from that point she definitely has dominant position with Cinder on the ground she can stomp on her head, summon her sword and stab her and then get interrupted by the dragon and then we could continue onward.

Then there's this scene. God I hate this scene because it goes against all those years of fighting and practice because for me and my three years of fencing there are five tenets of swordsmanship and the number one tenet is protect yourself and when Pyrrha gets up she has plenty of time to see that Cinder is winding up her shot and she should've just raised her shield and let her shield take the shot AND NOT FALL INTO THE ACHILLES ARCHETYPE. That character archetype felt so forced, but let's say it's the heat of the moment and she doesn't notice that Cinder is winding up her shot and she does throw her shield WHY WOULD SHE BE TURNED AROUND WHEN THE ARROW HITS HER, IT LOOKS SO WEIRD LIKE WHEN I THROW A BALL, OR A FRISBEE AND WHEN I THROW IT I DON'T THROW IT WITH SO MUCH DRAMATIC FLAIR THAT I END UP TURNED AROUND. It really bothers me because she's a renown combatant and that's just a silly mistake for someone of her class to make. If she wasn't turned around she might have had time to see the arrow fall apart and then reform and potentially roll out of the way and keep fighting. And even if the arrow did hit, it shouldn't pierce the armor (though that's been under much debate).

And final moment that I think that Pyrrha could've kept fighting.

This scene. At this scene when Cinder is all touchy with Pyrrha spewing out her monologue that would be a great time to grab her arm and leap off with her good leg using her adrenaline to keep going and taking cinder to the ground and do some ground wrestling and hold on until Ruby gets there which wasn't very long. I just remember a comic someone made where Pyrrha asks cinder if she believes in destiny then suplexes cinder which was just hilarious, I loved it so much. But as I've been told before Pyrrha was probably going into this fight expecting to die but at the start she went in fighting for her life, at least that's what it looked like and I also know it was decided before this volume that Pyrrha was going to die it just seems like it was set up poorly hence this post.

Hope y'all like it and I'll see you on the next post.

[itsclydebitches]

FNDM: Powerlevels are just a mechanic for video games, what really matters is what the fight accomplishes!

Also FNDM: Ironwood struggled beating up that twig Watts, what a weak loser lol.

I’m not going to pretend that I wasn’t a little surprised when the story started setting up a Watts fight, just because of the long-standing implication that he was just the tech dude, but at least (to my recollection) RWBY never included things that outright steered us away from that idea. That’s my problem with Maria suddenly busting out moves against Neo. She’s animated as this hunched, slow-moving, cane-needing old lady who gets to be pushed through the snow because she can't possibly walk that far. She’s been traveling with a group that continually enters combat situations and never once, prior to now, helped them out. She’s supposed to be Ruby’s mentor, but never offered to train her. All of this, combined with the show not treating her skill reveal like a deliberately hidden twist—there are no nearby allies to exclaim in shock, no lines from Maria explaining why she’d keep this hidden—makes the writing feel inconsistent. Watts though? It works. He is primarily the tech dude, but that doesn’t eliminate other skills, and because he’s the tech dude no one expects him to act otherwise unless that’s necessary (like being unexpectedly cornered by Ironwood when he went to do sabotaging tech things to Amity). And he’s not been around for most major battles (like Haven) rather than deliberately sitting them out for unestablished reasons. The Watts vs. Ironwood fight is one of the best we’ve gotten in years and I think that’s partly due to how they’re balanced. Both possess aura that allow them to accomplish incredible, physical feats. (Skinniness/bulk means nothing in a world where magic is the linchpin of all battles. Ruby is a "twig" too.) Both—we thought at the time—lacked a semblance. Both use guns for a long-range fight. And though Ironwood undoubtably has more experience, what with being a huntsmen and general, Watts levels that playing field by using technology to his advantage: manipulating the tower and, eventually, catching him in a trap. Honestly, this fight makes the most sense since Qrow had to step in and help RNJR against Tyrian!

Putting aside that double standard though—which just exists to dismiss any unwanted analysis of Ironwood: don’t think about the show and criticize it, but if you do “read into” things the only possible conclusion here is that he’s incompetent—I’m always surprised that fans don’t get that we should have both power levels and fights that accomplish something for the story. This is a battle webseries. If there’s no sense of who is stronger than who and how we measure that, then there’s no growth for the characters to undergo and no stakes for us to get invested in. What if I went, “In Volume 9 Cardin somehow shows up and single-handedly kicks Ruby’s ass”? If the reaction to that is disbelief to any extent—but Ruby is a prodigy! Cardin was a joke character not meant to be very strong! He couldn’t land a hit on Pyrrha! He hasn’t spent the last five volumes honing his skills through deadly combat!—then congrats, you’re invested in RWBY’s power levels and are actively looking for details to support your understanding of it. No fan actually wants a fighting show without some understanding of who is stronger than who and why that’s the case. How detailed an understanding each fan will want varies (a lot), but without some kind of framework, it’s just a senseless free-for-all.

However, a good power level system shouldn’t limit the author’s ability to use fights for a greater purpose in the story, it just requires utilizing aspects of a fight outside of that power. There are things like luck. Mistakes. Strategy. Priorities other than winning, etc. How many times has Goku, clearly the strongest person on the battlefield, been (temporarily) defeated by his overly trusting nature? Or, in one memorable case, a heart condition? How many times has he defeated other, stronger opponents through one particularly good idea—such as holding Raditz so Piccolo can blast through both of them? Moments like these are compelling because they tell us something about the character’s personality (trusting), their priorities (backs down now that a friend is threatened), or what they’re willing to sacrifice (their life). With a bit of thought and creativity, any weaker character should be able to beat a stronger opponent, especially in a team-based show. RWBY has the general idea in places… just not the execution. Yang’s recent fall remains the easiest example. Having her love for Ruby resulting in a “fatal” blow is the exact kind of situation I’m talking about, it’s just that the episode speed-rushed that conclusion and tried to explain too much with a single sword slash. If Yang had been allowed to fight for a long time, if we saw her aura get low/break, if she was still awake when she fell, if all her teammates tried to help her, but a series of events prevented her from getting to safety… that moment would have been great. The author just needs to put in the work to make that unexpected win or loss believable.

Funnily enough, I think Volumes 7-8 did the best work here in regards to Ironwood. I believe that a general and member of Ozpin’s inner circle is skilled enough to personally join the Battle for Beacon. I believe that he and Watts were fairly even until Watts springs a trap and I likewise believe that someone as determined as Ironwood could pull his arm out to win. I believe that when it’s five on one, even a fighter of his skill will, likely, lose if the fight is drawn out and he fails to come up with a quick-fix way to win. And I believe that he could go toe-to-toe with Winter up until she’s imbued with magical powers that result in a K.O. There are details that are lacking at times—giving Ironwood that ridiculous gun, being inconsistent about exactly how powerful Maidens are compared to average fighters—but on the whole his fights make sense in a way many others in RWBY don’t nowadays. Which is just one reason why many fans are frustrated. There was so much good attached to Ironwood’s character. I don’t mean morally good, I mean good writing: a complex personality, difficult decisions, cool combat, fights that felt fair and earned and exciting in their believability. Tossing all that away for the nonsense we got later—Ironwood randomly wants to bomb people now, Ironwood has a clunky gun-gun that makes his combat look stupid, etc.—is, in some ways, worse than just getting bad content from the get-go.

RWBY needs a clear hierarchy of power and the creativity to make outcomes surprising anyway. It also needs the willingness to stick to what its established, rather than tossing it away in the name of a new goal. Ironwood is a larger, non-combat example of what you've referenced, anon. The writers wanted to accomplish a secondary villain... so they got rid of all the work they'd done with his character to get that, while simultaneously failing to do new work to explain this unexpected change. It's the "Yang taking a deadly blow for Ruby is a great idea, but how it was done isn't believable" expanded to an entire volume. And now we're left with many fans who are eager to buy into the message RWBY landed on—Ironwood is irredeemably evil and that's all there is to say on the matter—resulting in this intense desire to reframe everything he's ever done as evidence for that conclusion. Nothing from past volumes is allowed to be nuanced, heroic, or even just cool anymore. Ironwood had one of the best fights in recent years? Nah, now that he's a bad guy that fight is actually just evidence of how incompetent he is. Power levels don't matter when their existence would lead to a critique someone doesn't want to hear; they definitely exist when it makes characters a fan doesn't like look bad. A very versatile system!

[lore-of-the-silvereyes-rwby]

Ironwood Summary

Here we are at last the final conclusion of this long character analysis series, for now. This is mostly going to be my own opinion of the character based on the research I did for the analysis. As well as some ideas of what may happen to the character in future volumes and overall standing of what the character was always meant to be and represent in the rwby narrative. Also keep in mind that this is only an analysis of Ironwood’s character pre Volume 8 so there won’t be any spoilers used in this analysis or summary

(Before we begin i want to thank @spacecapart for his art to be used in this summary as i feel this piece summarizes how i feel about Ironwood)

When I started researching and writing on July 31st 2020  for Ironwood and the months that followed I feel like I have gained a better understanding of what exactly Ironwood’s character was meant to be while making sure my overall opinion of him wasn’t biased but honest and neutral. 

For the most part Ironwood’s life was just sad because, well it was never really his to begin with, since he pretty much had no say in it. Based on what I saw and learned about him with the help of additional lore as well as the current story Ironwood was just a tool and a plot device in the narrative.

He started as a tool for Mantle(pre Atlas) which planted the seeds that made him this cold inhuman person that we see at present due to its old toxic ideologies of imperialism and militarism combined with a Nietzsche's philosophy that survives and thrives through Ironwood once he become a de facto king when Atlas became an official kingdom.

Then he became a tool for Oz to protect and safeguard the current status quo without benefiting from it. Though it was with good intentions Ironwood couldn’t help but feel insulted that he was being restricted and kept in check by someone who does not share his belief or ideals of what he considers right even though they weren't his beliefs or the best to begin with.

Finally after all was said and done he became a tool for the very enemy that he swore to fight and defend against. Due to his toxic upbringing in Atlas and his bitter resentment for Oz he tried to take matters in his own hands only for it to backfire immensely into the events that we see in the show. As I Stated in “The Hero that was never meant to be” Ironwood was more or less the most prominent catalyst for all of the events and conflicts in the show that Salem took advantage of and prospered from simply due to Ironwood’s elitist and violent mindset.

All of this just contributes to Ironwood being a plot device since that he’s essentially just a philosophical mouthpiece for Atlas as the show has somewhat made it clear that he is basically the physical embodiment of Atlas if it were a person with both a voice and need to survive. Which wouldn’t be so bad if Atlas wasn’t the Remnant equivalent of a fasciest imperialist dystopia. Most of Ironwood’s character flaws mostly stem from the fact that his is simply the product of his origins and refusing to change or find a compromise for the better.

Another thing that I believe should be taken into consideration is his overall effect in the plot. Added by how the narrative has been structured with its main conflict I think it's safe to assume that no matter what, Ironwood was always a character that was set to fail ever since his introduction. This is mostly due to the fact that most if not all of his power comes from control and authority over others. As well as his lack of actual experience when it comes to war and conflict. 

As I stated in I am power with my own estimate of Ironwood’s age(47-50) based on his rank’s promotion requirements he has at least 30 years of experience from both his huntsmen and military career: 34 if we were to count his academy days of training. Now you're probably asking; “If he has that many years of experience in his career, then why are you saying he has none?” Well it is quite simple based on 2 factors; his professions and the time that he was born in.

At present he is both Headmaster of Atlas academy and the Atlas equivalent of the joint chiefs of staff of the Military. I think it's logical to assume that Ironwood gained the status of Headmaster first and General later due the needs of Oz. Given the importance of the relics hidden in the academies it would be a pragmatic choice for Oz to ensure that there was always a guardian and supervisor over the vaults as well as training the worlds next gen huntsmen(the agreed upon nuclear deterrent). 

Since his profession shifted from field combat to school administration upon becoming headmaster most if not all of Ironwood’s career from this point on saw very little combat opportunities and would soon be filled with politics once he became General further diminishing his combat skills. Also since Generals are the face of the military they mostly handle diplomatic and public affairs as well as deal with civilian contractors to ensure the military has the resources and gear needed to sustain itself.

This means that Ironwood went from fare soldier, to desk jockey, to financial benefactor throughout the entirety of his 30 year long career. But the two thirds of his later career  basically had no relevant or beneficial experience that would be suited for the war that he had been preparing a long time for. Ironwood’s lack of practical experience is also more damaging when you realize that the very little he did have also wouldn’t be of much help in the first place as well.

This is mostly due to the fact that Ironwood was born at the beginning of the high golden age of peace and prosperity for Mantle/Atlas and all of the concerning conflicts happening at least 5 years before the show’s start very late in his career at an estimated age of 45, with the white fang terrorists groups targeting SDC assets that he wanted for war. 

Also his career at that point most likely focused on policing and enforcing Atlasian laws rather than doing actual combat and even then he was trained to fight grimm instead of human combatants and even if he had to fight people they most likely are that of combat inexperienced and petty criminals that wouldn’t actually put up that much of a challenge and even then most of the fighting was done by disposable robots that he can command  with the press of a button.

Overall Ironwood was really unprepared to even fight anyone in general, let alone wage a war against Salem. Even if he had powered up that army to the maximum it really wouldn’t solve anything. Ever since the first episode of the series the message was clear; You're not going to win with just strength and power alone, but with acts of mercy and honesty. As well as just enjoying the simple things in life and just simply living life rather than just surviving. After all this time Ironwood forgot to live life and be satisfied with what he had. Because of this he’s just going to keep on pushing the limit until he loses everything that he has and drag everyone else with him. Simply because he wouldn’t admit to himself that he has no idea about what to do or accept that he wasn’t the most important piece on the board.

Which sadly brings me to the very likely truth that it is guaranteed that Ironwood’s part and time in the story is coming to an end and his death is drawing near. This has been foreshadowed in the beginning of volume 6 where the true plot and crisis of the story had basically made Atlas and by extension Ironwood irrelevant to the story when it's been made clear they can’t just simply kill Salem and win with brute force as he had hoped. Because of that Ironwood was no longer important to the story as they show and fandom have hyped him up to be. Even if he still had an actual role in the plot I’m afraid to say that Ironwood’s story (even if it wasn’t that much) has already been told and judging by the direction he is going by it’s only going to get worse for his character (moraly wise) to the point that his death may be a blessing in disguise for remnant.

To start we need to look at the essential core concepts that make up Ironwood’s character. If we remove all of his actions and focus on his archetypes we get a character that is A) Half robot, B) the de facto leader of an inefficient military(let's be honest it's just a glorified security force for rich douchebags.) C) A school principal and D) someone who essentially hails from what can be considered the most evil and inhuman kingdom of his world that values power and is placed into a story and conflict where none of those things even matter given what we know about the true stakes and consequences of the plot and this is essentially all that we even know about him in relation to the story.

Which brings me to this point that in my opinion he wasn’t much of a character to begin with. This is mostly due to the fact that we really don’t know anything about him besides the summarized 4 points from the last section. We don’t know anything about him like how he became involved in the plot, how old he is, when and what caused him to be a cyber, does he have anyone outside of work or any family that he cares about and more importantly why does he fight in the first place and what motivates him to do so and what does he hope to gain? These details to me are important as to give depth to a character as to better understand why they are the way they are. Otherwise they are either a philosophical mouthpiece or a living ideological caricature. As I stated before in Ironwood’s case he is just that for Atlas, just a simple tool that it can use for whatever it needs.

Which also brings up another subject towards his contributions to the plot; What exactly can he do and was he really even that important to begin with? As I stated before Ironwood really doesn’t have much to offer besides the Military which has been proven to be useless and unneeded. But if it was to be needed that doesn’t automatically mean Ironwood should be the one leading it. For example should he be removed from power and replaced and the heroes really need the military wouldn’t it be simple just to involve the new commander and chief or appoint someone they can trust to ally with them. So yeah the military part as well as the academy are what give an individual like Ironwood any relevance but that doesn't automatically mean they’re that important or crucial to begin with.

Simply put Ironwood has always been a character in the wrong genre. Had he been placed in any other circumstance he may have had a point and could have succeeded but in the case of his story he doesn’t have one. Ever since his debut he has always been this source of contradictions and antagonism and contrast when it comes to how the world and characters have been set. Due to this Ironwood has always been this source of escalation and conflict as he only follows his own beliefs and tries to force others to comply with them. As well as the truth that he really has no idea of what to do since he was never really prepared to handle anything like this and added by the fact that he won’t admit or consider the possibility that he is not that needed or important. If he continues on with this type of thinking it's only going to warrant his end as simply put by Oscar he really is just as dangerous as Salem.

Before I explain his overall purpose and status in the Narrative I want to go over several ideas for what may be next for Ironwood throughout the rest of the series which will be explained further by the reasoning I will use in the narrative part. 

Fate and status for Volume 8 and the rest of the series

Death

I think it's safe to say that Death flags have been hovering over Ironwood for a while or at least since Volume 7. But is it certain? Most likey. I say it’s near mostly due to my belief that his story has essentially been told and he really doesn’t have anything left to contribute to the plot at this point. The impact of his death whether it will leave a positive or negative impact remains uncertain. But the way of his death to me is certain; he’s going to die by the hands of another character(specifically a hero). I know most people would have hoped for a heroic sacrifice or a redemption by death but I don’t exactly see Ironwood doing such things. (Which I’ll explain in the next 2 bullet points)

If it hasn’t been made clear Ironwood has made more enemies than allies simply due to his inability to compromise or let go of his Atlasian ideals and ego. As well as his refusal to accept the fact that he really isn’t that important or necessary in this conflict or at least in the way he wanted to be. If he further descends into his own little world Ironwood is going to cause more problems and do more damage that can never be undone and the only way to stop it would be if he was out of the picture. Because of this Ironwood is likely to die in V8 or by the end of the Atlas arc but it is also possible that he may die at another point later in the series.

Redemption Arc

The chances for Ironwood’s redemption are slim but they’re there, but probably not in the usual way that everyone expects to happen. To help clarify the possibility of redemption we will be using the trifecta structure of redemption arcs. This includes; How the character sees himself, how they see the world, and the stakes and how they change over time. As well as the Scale and Values of his motivation. To help better understand let us take a look at Ironwood’s motivations and goals from V2 and how they contrast and differ from V7 Ironwood.

Volume 2 Ironwood’s motivations upon first glance are simple; stop the threat and ensure stability and security. However if you watch closely there is an ulterior motive. From this we can determine the true Values of his goals and the Scale of what he is willing to do to achieve them and they go as such;

His values as of V2 are security via large Military foundations and amassing complete control and influence over forign nations while promoting the agendas of Atlas imperialism.(similar to the Galactic empire in its early years from Star Wars) With the scale showing that he is willing to go to such lengths as propaganda and political manipulation and betraying allies to get what he wants(the greatest example of this being subverting control from Ozpin)

From this we know that Ironwood sees himself as this perfect savior that can do no wrong and should be the one in charge. While his views of the world being that everything is below him unless they match those of Atlas. With the stakes at the time being the possibility of losing imperial expansion and the threat of domination from a superior force that could shatter the foundations of his ideology and culture. 

While Volume 7 Ironwood’s motivations being; whatever it takes to preserve his perfect and ideal society even if it means sacrificing everything else before his valued culture is destroyed.

The values of this Ironwood definitely differ from previous versions of the character. As V7 Ironwood’s motivations have shifted from saving lives and defending them from Salem to preserving the very little bastion of control and authority that he has over Atlas. With the scale showing that he is willing to turn on allies and go as far as to abandon a whole heavily populated city and potentially the rest of the world in order to preserve the one thing that he has complete and unconditional control over.

Because of this a lot of Ironwood’s views have changed by the end of V7. 

Due to his streak of recent failures his views of himself changed from being the perfect leader that he thought he was, to accepting reality that he isn’t said leader and is prone to failure. However because of that thinking he no longer feels that he should hold himself to that set standard anymore and do what he thinks is needed to get his desired results. Which leads to the fact that he still views himself as the one that should be in charge but this time he does not feel compelled to be fair or considerate of either allies or people.

His views of the world really haven’t changed as much. He is just more honest, open and direct about his views by V7’s end where it's pretty clear that he values his military industrial complex that is Atlas over people's lives regardless of their affiliation.(It should be noted that Mantle is still apart of the Kingdom of Atlas as a whole so consider the fact that he is abandoning the part of it he deems is an acceptable loss without even trying to save it)

But the greatest and significant of changes for Ironwood in the plot are the stakes. Prior to being told the truth about Salem’s immortality he honestly thought that he could win and kill her and be free to pursue whatever task he could set his mind to now that she was gone. After being told and with the clear indication that his power(Atlas) was at risk he essentially is doing what raven did; cut his losses and settle with what he has and run. As such the stakes for Ironwood at this point are to preserve the very little power and control that he has currently at his disposal and sacrifice and do whatever he can’t to maintain it even if it means letting the rest of the world die or be under Salem's control.

This is just speculation but Ironwood’s chances for redemption are pretty slim but not impossible. But the key start and major factors to make that redemption possible is for him to yield power and let go of Atlas. As I stated before, Ironwood relies heavily on his control over Atlas as he believes it to be the only means to maintain and sustain a war as well as the only way of  enforcing his authority. To reiterate Ironwood true power and relevance to the story is his complete and unchallenged command over the Kingdom of Atlas and at the risk of sounding cliche; “All who obtain power are afraid to lose it even a hero” If there is to be any hope of defeating Salem and or maintaining peace in Remnant it can not happen with Ironwood being in power. Which may be more difficult than it seems which leads us to the possibility that he may not be redeemed and should he live past the Salem conflict with this type of thinking.

A New Enemy

For a character to be redeemed the character needs to want change for better but given his personality and recent events Ironwood at this point doesn’t feel or believe that he should change as he now has an ends justify the means mentality with the belief that he is this grand savior believing his way is the only way. Because of this it is very likely that he may stay an antagonist throughout the remainder of the series and possibly long after the main conflict.

The Third Faction; Okay I think it's a safe bet to say that no matter what Atlas was always going to be an antagonistic force that was being set up as early as V1. And unfortunately for Ironwood he ended up being the face and voice of said force that was there before he was ever given a name or a design.

Because of this setup it is possible that Atlas under Ironwood will become its own faction that may try to counter salem but at the same time will possibly sabotage the allies aka the main heroes and the rest of remnant since Ironwood’s paranoia has increased to the point that he doesn’t trust anyone anymore and most likely will reject any offer of aid or promise of an alliance  since Ironwood believes his in own hype that much that he will eventually become a problem that has to be stopped which will possibly lead to the end of Atlas. Which brings us to what might happen to the character post Salem and Atlas.

Post Salem Insurgency; This is speculation but it's possible that after Salem is defeated and Atlas is destroyed he would continue to be a threat for the rest of Remnant as he will be forced to answer for war crimes and step down from power with the possibility that he may never obtain it again. 

Given what we know of his personality Ironwood isn’t the type of guy to yield power or think he did anything wrong due to his ends justify the means montra. As such in the years following Salem's defeat and the possibility that Atlas may no longer exist or at the very least no longer subservient to Ironwood’s authority its most likely that he might end up in charge of a paramilitary consisting of the very few soldiers that are still loyal to him and start raiding and terrorizing settlements, cities and kingdoms all over remnant just to rebuild his military complex and infrastructure as a means to reclaim the status and power that he was stripped up.

How and why any of this would happen if it ever does is debatable but should it come to be Ironwood is going to need to compensate in order to survive if he becomes a legitimate threat which brings us to a very likely scenario based on his original inspiration 

Full Cyber

Given what happened near the end of V7 and recent V8 concept renders combined with the Tin-man inspiration I do believe that there is a very likely scenario that Ironwood will be more machine than man at some point in the series assuming he doesn’t die yet. This is pretty much a given scenario due to his favoritism for machines than people and his new found ideology that humanity is weakness now it is very likely when given the chance that Ironwood will willingly become full cybernetic(Possibly to the point of just simply being a brain in a new metal body)

 While this isn’t exactly an ideal outcome for the character but at the same time this would actually make Ironwood a credible threat as he would now be able to enforce his authority on his own now without relying on others to do it for him. Based on the research from the I am power post Ironwood is relatively a very weak character in comparison to a majority of other characters that we have seen so far and this is especially true when compared to the villains and main heroes. One key aspect to remember is that Remnant didn’t need the military only Ironwood did because on his own he’s screwed no matter what the situation.

Ironwood relies to heavily on his Army as it is the only thing that gives him some ambiance of a fighting chance but ultimately he is very ill suited to lead and manage said army that when you think of it are possibly full of people that are probably more capable than him as well as able to back up and defend their position of power on their own. Whereas Ironwood can not if he were to be overthrown by the military. In other words a fully cyberized Ironwood would actually be beneficial for him as it would make him a formidable threat beyond just simply being the guy who has the world's only military. Depending on what kind of enhancements he can get he would at least be on par with characters like Ruby Qrow and Yang and at the very best on the level of pre maiden Penny. Because as he is right now Ironwood would surely die if he were to face any character that is not within his capabilities. But this is my theory and observations but until we see more Ironwood’s best bet is going full cyber.

Role in the narrative & what we can learn from Ironwood

To start I think it's pretty clear that Ironwood in narrative is just a foil for most of the characters in the show. Especially with greater comparisons and emphasis on these 3 characters; Ozpin Ruby & Salem. While at the same time he is also the character representation that embodies Atlas the most and as such much about what we know and learned about Atlas is mostly due to Ironwood’s actions as he is the culmination and development of Atlasian culture. Unfortunately though this as far as his character was ever going to go. Which makes it all the more tragic and sad when you think about the role that he was supposed to serve.

We will first be breaking down each Foil comparison between Ironwood and the 3 prominent characters to plot as to better under his place in the narrative.

Ozpin

Of all the characters that exist in the RWBY story I do believe that Ironwood tried to emulate and be his own version of Ozpin(or any past incarnation). However unlike Ozpin Ironwood is biased, lacks actual experience and above all takes shortcuts to get faster results at the expense of others. I know that this mostly stems from good intentions but what exactly qualifies Ironwood to even think that he should be the one in charge to handle this Salem conflict. This is one of the greatest problems that is addressed in the show about Ironwood. He really believes that it's his destiny to lead by replacing Ozpin and win.

 But I ask again; What exactly can Ironwood do that would qualify him to even be worthy to take up Ozpin’s task?

That's just it really, there is nothing about him to warrant such a thing. When it comes to the foils between the 2 it's about being this Big Good character that should lead and the themes of Grey morality that R.T. has tried to implement into the show. But when it comes down to it Ozpin is the true Big Good while Ironwood was simply a pretender. Ironwood has always been a narrowed focused character that cares about the conflict itself instead of the people that are caught in the crossfire. And unlike Ozpin who has based all of his decisions and plans from experience and human nature, Ironwood had based his for a need to simply be right and in control.

In short Ironwood had wanted to be the next Oz as he believed he was more suited to do what Ozpin couldn’t even though he lacked the skills, experience, and power to do so which brings us to the next foil. 

Ruby Rose

This might be stretching a bit but when it comes to the plot there is no greater foil between characters than who is the real hero of the story. In this case is the hero of the series Ironwood or Ruby? To help answer this inquiry we need to know what exactly a hero is. Webster's dictionary defines a hero as a mythological or legendary figure often of divine descent, endowed with great strength or ability.

While other sources would say what qualifies  A hero can be as simple as a person that saves lives and stuff, but a hero can be anyone that does something they have fear of but are brave enough to still do something. Bravery is usually the biggest trait of any hero. This person has usually overcomes huge obstacles to survive or to rescue others.

A hero is selfless, a genuinely good person, and someone gets the undivided attention of all of us and causes change.

A hero takes action to help others at considerable risk to themselves, however, if that action also helps themselves, then they are not a hero because they are acting out of self-interest. Courage is admirable, but unless it involves risk or sacrifice in order to help others, then it isn't heroism.

So in short the true hero of the series is actually Ruby not Ironwood or any other character in the series. Not because she is one of the main characters or because this is a story from her perspective but because she has the ideal and pragmatic skills and abilities needed to handle the current situation of the plot as well as doing what Ironwood has failed to do himself confront fear and be brave. As I stated in paranoia over reason most if not all of his choices have been based on fear rather than actual logic, reason, or bravery. Which is further highlighted by facts discussed in I am power that Ironwood is really nothing without the military and doesn’t stand a chance on his own.  

This is indefinitely a stark contrast to ruby as she has proven since her introduction to be capable of handling the threat of Salem as she has the talents skills abilities power and above all the spark that inspires others that compels them to do great things for the right reasons which Ironwood failed to do as all of his action have had a certain goal that would only benefit a certain few with him being the one who would benefit the most. This is mostly due to how the 2 have responded and chose to handle the situation. 

When it comes down to it the main plot is defeating monsters that dominate the world who happen to have a leader controlling them. Remember the whole reason why Salem is even a credible threat is because she can control said monsters and the first premise before she came on screen for the first time was learning how to fight grimm. This is something that Ruby was training and preparing for since she was a kid with the added bonus of having the powers needed to handle the situation with ease while Ironwood has only been preparing for a war with other people rather than monsters and crush rebellions rather than being a guardian peacekeeper that Oz meant for him to be.

 Because of this Ironwood has contributed more to the problem more so than Ruby did as his actions were done in favor of Atlas and his own self interests were as Ruby makes honest mistakes out of ignorance and optimism. Which brings me to the next foil that Ironwood shares more qualities with than anyone else

Salem

I know I'm going to get a lot of heat for this but if you think about it Ironwood is basically a syfy dictator version of Salem’s fantasy dark lord. Face value it doesn’t seem likely but given what we know about their current lore, history, personally, and world building these two can be twins to some extent. The examples are as followed;

They’re both headstrong and blunt individuals who go too far in their endeavors when simple and easier solutions were present

They’re both isolated however Salem is isolated by circumstance and force while Ironwood is isolated by choice and paranoia which is ironically the results of their cold upbringing and history

They both lead organizations with questionable intentions that border on dark and immoral with goals that are based on self entitlement rather than rightfully justified or earned

And to top it off they essentially command armies of soulless killing machines

From these examples we have plenty of foils between the two with them being pride, isolation, tragedy, authority and probably the most important foil in regards to the plot War & Conflict. However when it comes down to it Ironwood is on the short end of these foils when compared to Salem. 

In terms of tragedy these two have let their past misfortunes dictate and influence their decisions resulting in a sense of entitlement that they have been wronged now the world has to compensate them for things to be right. For Salem she had a cruel upbringing for unknown reasons and life being unfairly cruel while Ironwood was lifely forced into servitude and was never really himself as he wanted to be. Salem’s tragedies are the result of grief and dealing with forces that she couldn’t comprehend. While Ironwood’s is the result of unchecked ambition and ignorance.

Similar to Oz, Salem has more experience being a leader that can exert their authority and will over others while Ironwood lacks the experience and therefore can’t do the same. The Grimm under Salem’s command are more of an oppressed hivemind that she leads with little to no resistance unlike her human subordinates. Thus Salem has more direct control and authority over those she commands and has the abilities necessary to keep them in line with her goals. While the people under Ironwood’s authority have a voice and mind of their own that don’t align with his ideas. Due to this he isn’t much of a respected leader as he thought he was. Because of this Ironwood is mostly kept in power by rules and regulations with everyone blindly following suit. 

 As for war Ironwood was without a doubt unprepared for it. This is mostly due to 4 reasons;

He had no idea of what he was doing

His opponents are of better a quality than anything he can make or round up

He was preparing for the wrong war that should never have come to pass.

He was to prideful and sure of himself that nothing can go wrong

When it comes to the 1st reason Ironwood was more or less a pseudo soldier in a time where militaries are pretty much obsolete. This is because militaries are used as power projection of a nation and convey the message to another nation to not cross them. Due to the timing there was no real reason or excuse to justify having a military during a point in time where people are more interested in developing a culture and living life rather than fighting in needless conflicts. As such there was no practical reason, competition, or threat to justify Ironwood’s demands for a large military when he came to power or ensure that it was of a better quality than whatever hypothetical enemy that he would face.

Salem on the other hand has had experience commanding armies before and probably has instigated several wars and conflicts prior to the founding of the current 4 kingdoms thus Salem would have at least accumulated centuries to millenniums of war experience that surpass Ironwood’s brief 30 years of service in the Atlas military. Given that Salem was already a crafty and manipulative person during a time when gods were still around, she most likely would have seen the mistakes and flaws that Ironwood has made and exploited them.

Leading into the 2nd reason Ironwood was pretty much in command of a terrible military. As stated in the 1st reason there was no real threat or competition that encouraged those in power besides Ironwood to remilterze. As well as the current military most likely being filled with people who don’t want to fight a war and most likely enlisted for economic reasons. Because of this and his paranoia Ironwood had to find a surrogate army to prepare for his war that in his mind could happen at any time. However this resulted in cheaply made Androids that can be assembled fast for quick deployment. Due to this Ironwood traded quality for quantity as not only was no one going to fight in his war but believed war was on its way soon. Out of misplaced desperation Ironwood hastily assembled a low quality army that never stood a chance.

In comparison to Salem’s main military force there aren’t that many differences. However the Grimm are slightly a better quality than what the Atlas military has to offer. This is mostly due to the fact that the Grimm are a semi sapient species that are capable of learning and adapting as well as possessing some level of self preservation with individual grimm being around longer than most of their kind becoming even more deadlier than them. While the androids that Atlas uses aren’t as they were made to be cheap and disposable and are mostly effective in large numbers. 

The 3rd reason for why Salem is doing well during this conflict with Ironwood is mostly due to the General preparing for the wrong type of war than the war that he is actually fighting in. After all is said and done Ironwood has solely been preparing for a war with other people rather than for monsters. This is because the Atlas military before Ironwood took charge wasn’t meant to fight a war. Not all militaries are formed or created to defend the people. Atlas is the type of military that serves only in favor of the best interest of the state of government rather than the people. 

Because of this Ironwood had spread misery and divided the people turning them into enemies. Salem would later take advantage of this division that Ironwood created as he was more focused preparing for war than managing the welfare of his citizens. This is speculation but most if not all of the weapons like penny and the Atlesian knights were solely made to fight human opponents as opposed to the grimm that Salem commanded. This is because Ironwood feared and distrusted people more than the monsters he fought.

The 4th and final reason why Ironwood never stood a chance is due to the fact that he believed in his own hype more than he should have. From key dialogues to certain character interactions and in universe lore Ironwood has always presented himself as this towering figure with unlimited power; A god among men so to speak. This shows us that ultimately Ironwood’s ego and pride have been inflated to the point that his overall common sense is non-existent. This is further explored and shown in the control tactics that he uses specifically these ones; Strength and Intimidation in Numbers; 

Some aggressors like to dominate a situation by having a number of associates or friends present to support their position. The superior numbers alone may constitute an intimidating presence. They can also back each other up and challenge an individual in turn during a proceeding. In addition, they may also put pressure on a person to make a decision before they're ready. At worst, the strength in numbers tactic may be used for direct or indirect bullying or harassment.

Ironwood's overall strategy is simply sowing fear and doubt into an enemy that he doesn’t understand with large and unnecessary shows of power wasting resources to cover a wide variety of unknown enemies that pose a threat to him regardless if they are with Salem or not. This is best seen with the thousands to millions of cheaply made androids that are only effective in large numbers and the one ship of the line that was too big to be suited for warfare as they function as more of a forward operating base with their great size giving them the intimidation factor without other supporting fleet vessels like frigates or corvettes.(FYI by my count from V6 ep13 there were at least 41 of those ships hovering above Atlas doing nothing)

This is even confirmed by Ironwood in V3 ep3 where he claims this to be the case with this line of dialogue; 

“The people of Vale needed someone to protect them, someone who would act. When they look to the sky and see my fleet, they feel safe, and our enemies will feel our strength.”

This sort of tactic would probably have been useful if it was applied in a conventional warfare plot with people being his opponent as this is a real life tactic used in militaries and the navy especially in the modern era. The problem however is that the plot isn’t about conventional warfare nor is it a battle between people but with monsters where these tactics are meaningless  to them. These tactics are ineffective when compared to Salem’s psychological hit & run terror tactic being used in a setting like RWBY’s are quite effective and more useful than anything Ironwood can come up with. Even though they rely on opportunity and time to become a practical threat the end result is a huge payoff to the one who applied them with that being Salem. 

To sum it up when it comes to the foils of war between these 2 characters all you really need is the right tactic, strategy or plan and everything falls into place regardless of whether you have an army or a handful of misfits all it takes is careful thought and patience something of which Ironwood has shown to be lacking.

In conclusion what we learn from these foils are Leadership, Heroism, and War and how no matter what Ironwood was always on the short end of these traits and was never going to reach his ideal scenario for each of these ideas as he had set high expectations that were well above his capabilities and now he’s paying the price.

The Atlas Meta Narrative’s influence on Ironwood

Based on my research and what I have stated before; the greatest source of Ironwood’s flaws and antagonism is largely due to the influences of his home kingdom; Atlas. 

Just like Ironwood Atlas is also a foil setting and culture to the other kingdoms and the rest of Remnant. The reasoning for this is best explored in the established lore and other expanded material. To help better understand, here is a brief summarized history and development of the Kingdom of Atlas;

Before Atlas came to be it first started as Mantle who began as a group of desperate people trying to survive. Taking advantage of the cold climate of Solitas they were safe from the Grimm and had an unknown amount of time to develop both their technology and culture without restraint or interference. Eventually this progress was stalled due to a Grimm incident in Mantle that forced the current leaders of the kingdom to make radical and unnecessary regulations that suppress basic human emotions and rights instead of putting the effort to protect the people. 

When the Great war started Mantle joined only to ensure that its like minded imperialist ally Mistral would supply them the resources needed to survive. Because of this and the extreme measures they enforced on their citizens to control them prior to the war Mantle was most likely considered the most evilest faction during the war. When the war came to an end with Mantle suffering an embarrassing defeat it led to an age of cultural segregation and discrimination upon Mantle in the post war era.

Following the war Mantle entered an age of isolation and economic depression due to distrust and suspicion from the other kingdoms as they would only view them as this inherently evil and tyrannical force that can’t be trusted. Because of this the lingering scar of the toxic ideology of pre-war Mantle survived and is echoed in its spiritual successor; Atlas where it continued what Mantle couldn’t survive and thrive under the same core ideology that they had 80 years ago when they were still Mantle with only minor changes made to prevent the other kingdoms to intervene and possibly destroy their so called perfect culture. 

After they lost a scar had remained and an echo was created that still lingers to the present. Due to cause and effect Atlas at its core was developed to be this amoral conservative xenophobic dystopia that was being led by corrupt individuals that were in pursuit of their own self-interests rather than serving their citizens and were kept in power by blind followers that couldn’t see their real intentions. As a result Atlas became a culture of exploitation, expansion, repression, and subjugation for the well being of the political entity that is the state at the expense of its people and others. 

In relation to Ironwood as I stated before is a byproduct of this system and is simply one of a long line of blind followers that eventually supplanted the leadership and chose to continue the machine that is Atlas and replaced cogs needed to keep it running as he was once forced to do throughout his life because he doesn’t know of anything else. 

Because of this upbringing and the history of his origins Ironwood was more or less viewed as indifferent in the eyes of his own people and evil in the eyes of others. Leading to a clash of beliefs within Ironwood that resulted in conflicts with others and the main meta narrative theme that we were meant to learn from him; The essence of Being.

The Essence of Being

Essence is defined as the core nature or most important qualities of a person or thing. Essentially the narrative lesson that we can learn from Ironwood is the age old lesson that has been echoed from R.T. longest running series but with a more individual focus. That's right, Ironwood's journey and arc in the story is an inverse and modification of the classic RVB question; “Do you ever wonder why we're Here.”

But in the case of Ironwood it's more focused on an individual person asking and the age old question of Why am I here and what is my purpose and how do they justify and understand it.

As I stated before Ironwood was simply the wrong character in a different genre from a writing and story perspective. But in universe from the perspective of Ironwood it's simply a matter of him asking; “Why am I alive and here, and why am I this instead of that in a world like this?” At some point everyone questions the reality and circumstances of their situation and it's probably common questioning on a world, setting, and reality like Remnant. For Ironwood it’s possible that he’s asked these questions more than anyone. As for the reasons why he would question his existence go as follow;

Why was I born in Atlas?

How do I prove I'm good when others think I’m evil by proxy? 

Why I’m I so weak when compared to more skilled & powerful people?

Why was I made to be reliant on others that can’t rely on themselves?

I’m I respected only for the rank or the man?

Does anyone really care about me or I’m I being used by sycophants?

Will anyone care when I’m gone?

Why won’t anyone give me a chance?

How do I justify and understand the reasons why I'm here?

Does any of this matter in the end?

The core of Ironwood’s journey, actions, motives, and story wasn’t about saving the world, the balance of grey morality of people, or even the preservation of a certain culture, but instead is about cementing a legacy to escape the harsh reality that everything we do will eventually be undone. It's such a freighting thing to fall but is even more freighting is to admit it

In a way Ironwood's story is somewhat relevant to this line from Monty Oum in regards to immortality; “The goal isn't to live on forever; it's to make something that does.” CRWBY has even stated that Ironwood is a forward thinking individual/ A dreamer if you would. Because of this Ironwood was more focused on where he was heading rather than focus on where he was and what he was doing Causing a lot of problems to happen and escalating events to the point that we see them in the shows present. This oversight and negligence is because he continued to believe that, like everything else in his life, it would be righted by the sheer force of his will.

But sadly he is just only one man put on the world for a brief moment of time that is rather minuscule and insignificant on a cosmic and meta level. Everything changes and legacies are either forgotten or are repeated. In the end time and death are the ultimate victors as they undo everything and the cycle repeats itself for better or worse and individuals like Ironwood are just caught in the middle repeating and doing the same thing that has probably already happened and will probably happen again. All it takes is just a matter of time.

My Thoughts and conclusion

For the most part I was pretty much cautious when it came to the character and felt that he was more or less a side character trying to be a main one. The problem with that however in my thoughts is that well he doesn’t really have much to go on to warrant such a status. As well as how the plot has been structured Ironwood was never going to get what he wants. He may have had good intentions but at the end of the day he is only human with his own wants and needs.  

Overall I do feel that his part in the story is over. Mostly because he tried to take the lead of it. Meta understanding aside Ironwood’s time is coming to an end and I hate to say it but it probably would be for the best. Not just everyone else in the show but for himself as well. As I stated Ironwood’s life is Sad because well it never was really his to begin with. It's illogical because he was ill equipped to be a part of the setting that he was in. His death is more than guaranteed because he has nothing left to contribute to the story that can’t be done by anyone else. At this point with the overall message of death in the show it would be mercy and relief for Ironwood as Death is not the worst thing that can happen to you.

I still hold hope though as I’ve come to understand and see why people are fascinated by his character. But for that hope to be possible Ironwood has to let go of Atlas as it has been the main source of conflict between him and everyone else.

Well that's it I’m done for now as this is an analysis of Pre V8 Ironwood and maybe after V8 I may add more research of V8 Ironwood and see how much i got right in the initial analysis. After doing this I hope to do an analysis on Qrow Branwen and other RWBY characters hopefully in a much shorter amount of time as opposed to the months it took me to do Ironwood.(then again this was my first character analysis) Until then be on the lookout for additional bonus content for Ironwood such as;

Character comparisons from fiction

Character comparisons IRL

How you can fight & Kill Ironwood

A more indepth look of his new cybernetics

What Ironwood should have done

His relationship with other characters

The possibility of an Ironwood spin-off

That's all for now. Let me know what you think and thank you all who helped made this analysis possible.

[jauneda1]

RWBY

The New War AU part 2

Classes and combat training

(Jaune's mind)

"Professor Port's classes where one of the best classes to attend, you get to kill Grimm of a low level and show off new skills. The only down side is he talks entirely to fucking much."

Professor Port: Blah blah blah blah

(Jaune's mind)

"Fucking hell this is boring. When the hell our we gonna get to kill some Grimm. He didn't even ask us to take notes he's just talking and gloating about how he done this and that. Not to mention he keeps gawking at Yang. Oh and I swear to God if he winks at her again I'm gonna shove that mustache up his ass. Haa calm down Jaune... Yang... Why did you say no?

Two days ago on the Rooftop

Yang: Jaune... I love you, You know that right?

Jaune: Yes and I love you two that's why I want to make this permanent. We've been off and on for so much but really I don't think I'm complete without you.

Yang: Jaune you are absolutely fine without me. I know remembering Ricky is hard for you but I'll always be there for you.

Back In Ports Class

Jaune is just sitting there unaware that Port chose him for today's bout.

(Jaune's mind)

" Why are women so confusing, this is why we keep breaking up I don't understand her and maybe I should work more on that or..."

Professor Port: Mr.Arc first please remove your hood. Second I have chosen you for today's unarmed Grimm battle training.

Jaune Arc: Okay sir... Wait did you say unarmed?

On The Combat Floor

Jaune Arc: Why do I have to be unarmed again?

Professor Port: As a Huntsman Mr.Arc you must always be ready for any situation. Like if an Ursa major where to knock your sword away-

Jaune Arc: I would have my shield.

Professor Port: But you have nothing, besides in my days I could take on 10 Ursa with my bare hands.

Professor Port winked in Yang's direction which resorted in Yang feeling embarrassed and disgusted.

(Jaune Arc)

That bastard did it again I don't care what he sends at me I'm gonna beat it into the fucking ground.

Professor Port: Now Mr.Arc your opponent will be a Ursa Major.

Jaune Arc: 😂😂😂

Jaune rushed forward with aura infused in his legs. A few people where surprised and thrown of when they heard him laugh. But Jaune cared not as he slid past the Ursa and with his momentum spun around. Putting his hands on the ground and putting aura into his hands and grip latching onto the floor and gaining a good base. He then kicked the Ursa in the leg shattering the bone and destroying everything beneath the skin. Jaune then backflipped out of the overhead swipe the Ursa threw out of pain. Jaune saw his opening again rushing forward and tackled it but the Ursa stood strong until. Jaune with his hands still wrapped around the Ursa spinning around now behind the Ursa Jaune lifted with his back and legs aura coursing throughout his body giving off a blue highlight. All the while Jaune is building up his to release his semblance.

With a loud smash and to the amazement of the entire class with the exception of Yang and Ruby Jaune German suplexed the Ursa Rolling over with the momentum of the suplex and lifting the Ursa up. With the same strength now doubled he shifts his weight to now Jaune is lifting up and about to slam the Ursa into the ground with his one arm. This feat of strength from this tall and scraggly looking man. Shook everyone in the room even Professor Port. Jaune standing only 5 feet from the Ursa began to speak since he's been silent since the beginning of the battle.

Jaune Arc: 😂😂😂 An Ursa Major 😂😂😂 it's like throwing around a bag of potatoes. GET UP AND ACT LIKE THC KILLING MACHINE YOUR SUPPOSED TO BE! I've seen the battle scar's on you. You've been through a lot now come at me everything you've got Beasty.

The room was quite till the Ursa rushed at Jaune with a mighty roar even without one of it's legs and with one slash Jaune was sent back like 2 or 3 feet. The Ursa if it could look it would. Now Jaune's 2nd favorite hoodie was slashed through but that wasn't nothing compared to what everyone was paying attention to even Yang and Ruby where surprised by the secret semblance he had been hiding from everyone. Jaune's body was surrounded with auric blue Flame and there are blue lines spider webbing out from a bright blue light where his heart should be and Jaune's eyes are bright blue.

Jaune Arc: Okay my turn

Jaune then tore off the shredded hoodie revealing that he is a hell of lot more ripped and muscular then he may seem. With one burst of speed and Jaune was now holding the Ursa in a bear hug and with a mighty roar Jaune's eyes mouth expunging blue flames.

Jaune Arc: BAHAMET DETONATION

With that Jaune Arc let out a self detonation the explosion was controlled. To the eyes of everyone there they saw a orb of pure blue flame and the feeling of an explosive going off in front of them. All that was left was a decent size crater and Jaune Arc standing there with obvious exhaustion.

Jaune Arc: Cough... Did I past?

Lunch Room

Yang:😭😭😭 Then he yelled out this phrase like he was a super hero

Ruby:😭😭😭 He did something similar back in Signal right lol.

Jaune: Yeah yeah laugh it up. Ow my body really hurts, that's the first time I've tried releasing full power.

Weiss: Wait you've never used it before?

Jaune: Nope I still have some of it built up inside me. I'm going to probably have to go burn it off. I felt the size of the explosion it would of wiped out the entire classroom so I pulled more then half of it back into my body.

Nora: The was so cool though, I almost couldn't help but jump from excitement the way you moved so fast.

Ren: You where extremely focused in that fight it was like you where in the zone.

Nora: That is the power of a high grade. I didn't think much about power difference but you even said you got some energy stored up. Btw you need to let me see the explosion at full power and when you burn off the rest later.

Jaune: Sure

Nora: So your basically your in beatable you use a sword and shield and your semblance is basically a walking explosion with a smoking hot btw.

Jaune: Thank you

Ren: Nora.

Nora: Sorry sorry. So how does it work?

Jaune: Well... It's like a strength storing semblance. I store up kinetic energy from successful attack my targets or receiving damage. I can't do anything with it till I've hit critical mass which is when my heart starts to burn bright through my chest. Then I can use that explosion.

Yang: Bahamet Detonation😂😂😂

Jaune: Yes Yang Bahamet Detonation. I can control the output and size of the explosion. But if I wanted I'm pretty sure I can store even more. But that cause great harm to me I actually had a burn scar over my heart on my chest due to me trying to store copious amounts of energy... I guess it's really good for groups of enemies.

(Jaune's Mind)

"Fuck my body is hurting I should of condensed the size of the explosion and let it all out. But I've never done that I have a lot of aura but I don't think I would survive that it already hurt to do what I did in class."

Jaune: Hey guys I would love to stay and chat but I need to go burn off the energy left. If anyone wants to see the explosion follow me.

Nora: Oh definitely me.

Blake: Should be fun

Ruby: yay

That's a wrap for part 2

Character analysis

Jaune Arc: Age 18, Huntsman classification, High Grade, Battle classification, Vanguard, the vanguard classification is a hybrid between oppressor and tank with they're oppressing attacks keeping they're targets at bay an they're tank like strength they can keep multiple targets on edge and defeat them single handedly.

Semblance: Kinetic energy store and dispersal, Jaune stores up kinetic energy from combat and can release it with enough output to cause a devastating explosion that can reduce anything in the blast radius except Jaune to atoms.

[kriss-watches-stuff]

Alright now on to the fight I expected and... uh oh. Weiss has a lot of training. And training. And training. And that's about it. How can I tell? "Not that forward." Weiss is taking the time in the middle of a fight to assume textbook perfect form. This is a very bad thing. I used to take martial arts, tae kwon do, I made it to high green belt before quiting. Anyway we did as part of training regular spars. The people I liked to go against the most were like Weiss. If my foe took the time to do a bunch of little corrections in their stance like this before a match my confidence soared. This is a sure sign of several weaknesses. Lack of practical experience, slavery to form, a tendency to hesitate and overthink, and predictable attack patterns. My usual strategy against such foes was to throw a very minor, easy to read, and not too fast feint and then exploit the gaps caused by the textbook defense they launched into upon identifying the "attack" heading for them. It worked depressingly well. The point of a stance isn't to be perfect in form. The point is to be automatic, comfortable, and advantageous. To this day if I get surprised by something I often drop back into attack stance instantly. And despite not doing martial arts for over a decade my friend who is a 3rd dan blackbelt compliments me that it's still a very well executed stance. The point I'm getting at is that your stance should be autimatic and not something you critique. If you haven't reached that stage yet practice your stance over and over again before focusing on your attacks. It honestly makes a world of difference. tldr Weiss is too focused on form and technique and not enough on actually fighting. Also for some reason she wears heels in combat.

[razieltwelve]

Pre-Combat Analysis (Final Rose)

Averia took another bite out of her hazelnut-spread sandwich. She blamed it entirely on Diana, but she had something of a sweet tooth. Of course, she wasn’t above using Saviour to prevent tooth decay, but if anyone asked, she would claim she was simply doing it as a way of practicing her control. Nearby, a hedgehog ambled through the pleasant gardens of academy. The critter trotted over, and she gave him a few slices of banana. She had no idea why there were hedgehogs on academy grounds, but she wasn’t going to complain. They were adorable.

Footsteps and fluctuating Aura drew her attention, and she turned her attention to Team RWBY who were marching toward her with a purpose. Or rather, Weiss was marching toward her with a purpose whilst the others followed behind like the good, loyal teammates they were. In truth, Averia had been expecting a visit from Weiss ever since she’d heard the announcement.

Rin Tohsaka had issued a formal challenge, and Weiss had accepted. The bout would be taking place in a week. Naturally, bets were already being taken as to the outcome, and Averia had reason to believe that the majority of the staff were in on it too.

“Averia,” Weiss said. “I need your help.”

Averia took one last bite out of her sandwich and offered the remaining slices of banana to the hedgehog. “Have a seat.”

X     X     X

Weiss was not given to false confidence, not anymore, not after a full semester at Beacon. She’d seen firsthand what some of the monsters of the academy could do. The last sparring session between Elsa and Pyrrha had resulted in a frozen wonderland littered with spikes of metal and other debris.

It would have been so easy to underestimate Rin. After all, she was coming from another academy, and she had access to far less resources than Weiss. But Rin wasn’t stupid. She wouldn’t have challenged if she didn’t think she could win, and Weiss wasn’t about to let arrogance get the better of her.

More to the point, she knew basically nothing about how Rin fought whereas Rin undoubtedly knew more about how she operated in battle. The best way to even that disparity was to consult someone who had fought Rin. The fact that the person in question was also one of the greatest combat minds in history was yet another reason to seek her out.

“What can you tell me about Rin?” Weiss asked, deciding not to beat around the bush.

Averia looked at her for a long moment, and Weiss shivered. There was something distinctly inhuman lurking behind her emerald gaze. It was Saviour, the legendary Semblance taking her measure in an instant before it faded.

“First and foremost,” Averia began. “Rin is a specialist in hand-to-hand combat. If she gets close enough to punch you, the fight is effectively over. You will lose.”

Weiss stared. “She’s that good?”

“In terms of pure skill, I would put her hand-to-hand combat skills at slightly under Yang’s. How long do you think you’d last against Yang without a weapon?”

Weiss paled. “Not very long.”

“Rin has a highly refined style that focuses primarily on striking. She can and will pick you apart over time, but she is more than willing to simply wade in and finish a fight if she thinks she can. Her greatest attributes at her speed and technique. She has exceptional speed, and her technique is extremely well-practiced and refined. I can’t say for certain where the style originated since it seems to be a highly idiosyncratic combination of techniques, but the style seems to be optimised for inflicting massive internal damage while showing as few tells as possible. It is a very direct style in terms of its movements and the path its strikes take.” Averia’s lips twitched. “It’s not quite Yang’s flavour of fighting, but I do think she’d be rather good at it.”

“So I need to avoid close combat.” Weiss swallowed thickly. She’d sparred Yang enough times to know how hard it could be to keep a determine melee specialist away without her team to back her up. It was a weakness she was working on, but there was still plenty of progress to be made. “What about her Aura usage?”

“She’s an average one,” Averia replied.

Weiss bit back a curse. An average one was a person whose proficiency in the four main aspects of Aura (control, capacity, output, and regeneration) were all approximately equal. Someone who was weak in one area could be attacked in that area. For instance, someone who had a relatively small Aura capacity could be outlasted by someone with more. “At what level?”

“Hmm...” Averia paused. “I would say that she is in the top 10% of our year in all four attributes.”

“...” Weiss was beginning to get a migraine. “Are you serious?”

“I am.” Averia nodded. “Saviour saw.”

“It did?”

“Saviour sees everything, and it’s trivially easy for me to run the analysis and observation parts of my Semblance during spars.” Averia shrugged. “She has the edge on you in Aura capacity and regeneration, but you do have the edge in Aura control and output. I will say that she uses her Aura extremely well to enhance her own physical performance.”

“That’s our team’s glass cannon for you.” Yang patted Weiss on the shoulder. “Just don’t ever get hit, and you’ll be bound to win.”

“That doesn’t help, you know.” Weiss sighed. “What about her Semblance?”

“Wait...” Yang frowned. “Has she even used her Semblance? I’ve seen her spar a couple of times. She uses Dust a lot, just like you, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen her use her Semblance.”

“You have,” Averia replied. “But you didn’t know it. Rin’s Semblance is a form of property imbuing. Essentially, she can imbue certain kinds of objects, mostly gems from my observation, with particular properties. These properties range from simple explosions to binding and trapping. The fact that she often uses Dust crystals and fragments for this makes it difficult for people to realise what she’s doing.”

“Wait...” Weiss shook her head. “Could she do something like throw fire Dust and imbue it with a trapping ability preventing you from dodging once it’s close enough?”

“Yes.” Averia nodded. “That is precisely the kind of thing she can do. She can also imbue, for example, a water attack onto lightning Dust to create an electrically charged cloud. Moreover, other crystals, such as quartz, ruby, and so on, also have particular properties that she can use of.”

“Wonderful.” Weiss sighed. “This is not going to be easy.”

“No, it’s not.”

X     X     X

Meanwhile...

“Rin,” Saber said. “You do realise that Weiss will likely seek out Averia Yun-Farron for aid.”

“I know that.” Rin scowled. “That girl will use every advantage she has, and Averia is a huge one. I’ve sparred her before, so we have to assume that Averia has already worked out my Semblance and fighting style. What we need is someone who can tell us about Weiss.” Rin’s lips curled. “And I know someone who might just be willing to help us, if only to make the betting more interesting.”

Rin knocked on the door in front of them.

Diana’s voice rang out. “Yeah?”

X     X     X

Author’s Notes

Averia has fought Rin once for a total of five minutes. That’s why she’s so scary. The rest she gleaned from watching Rin spar. She’s a killer robot for a reason. That said, this is not a good matchup for Weiss. Individually, Weiss is the worst 1 v 1 fighter on Team RWBY, and Rin is a fine single combatant. Rin’s biggest advantage is that she can attack at long range (not at Weiss’s level) but will absolutely dominate close-range combat. Weiss’s advantage is that after just a semester of training with her team, she already hits like a truck. She hasn’t become the Glyph cannon of ultimate doom she later becomes, but she already hits harder than Rin can. If she can tag Rin or keep her out and bombard her at range, she will win the fight.

That said, Averia is a master fight planner who can likely develop a way for Weiss to maintain distance. But there might not be anyone who understand how to get close and stay in there better amongst the students than Diana who understand precisely how to leverage durability and physical abilities to close in for melee combat.

Who will emerge victorious?

If you’re interested in my thoughts on writing and other topics, you can find those here.

I also write original fiction, which you can find on Amazon here or on Audible here.

[supersaiyanjedi14]

RWBY COMBAT ANALYSIS: JAUNE ARC (VOLUMES 1-8)

“You're right, Ren. I… I did cheat my way into Beacon. And I'm glad that I had people around me to help me see that I was bigger than that mistake. You've got people around you too. You don't have to force yourself to be strong. The more you hide from what you're feeling, the more alone you're going to feel. Trust me.”

As I mentioned in my previous Versus Series match, this analysis of Jaune Arc's combative abilities will be focused on his appearances until RWBY Volume 8, prior to falling into the Ever After and being displaced in time. The strengths and limitations of Jaune before he became the Rusted Knight are simply more interesting to discuss, and, similarly to Maria Calavera, the significant gap in time between his being sent back and Volume 9 makes equating the two inappropriate. While Rusted Knight Jaune did display just enough in Volume 9 for me to have a good gauge of where he stands, this analysis is already stupidly long (over 6000 words and 11 pages) so pulling a joint profile like I did with Maria will likely bore you out. Although, If you want me to do a breakdown for Rusted Knight Jaune, let me know!

With all that out of the way, let's begin.

PHYSICAL

Jaune Arc is a human male, nineteen years of age when he fell into the Ever After two years after the Fall of Beacon.  Born into a family with a history of distinguished Huntsmen and military service, Jaune grew up on stories of heroism and glory, seeking to emulate of his forebearers and dreams of becoming a great legendary hero.  Despite this ambition, though the exact reasons are currently unconfirmed, Jaune Arc never attended a combat school, living a wholly civilian life alongside his parents and seven sisters.  However, Jaune was determined to achieve his dream to the point of cheating, forging transcripts to gain admission to Beacon Huntsman Academy in Vale.  Unsurprisingly, his nonexistent training left him severely out of his depth compared to his classmates, while his misguided belief in his need to excel on his own merits led to him rejecting offers for aid from his teammates.  Fortunately, a short conflict with class bully Cardin Winchester led to Jaune eating some much-needed humble pie, and he submitted himself to private tutoring from his partner, the Mistrali prodigy Pyrrha Nikos.  Pyrrha’s training greatly picked up the slack and helped Jaune truly develop his skills as a fighter and leader, making genuine contributions to the defense of Vale and Team JNPR’s Vytal Festival battles.  Sadly, the Fall of Beacon and Pyrrha’s subsequent death cut his training short, and he found himself thrust headfirst into the war with Salem, his subsequent development coming from direct experience in the field and his being forced to cope with the mounting pressure of his traumatic experiences.

While Jaune Arc’s lack of combat training left him woefully underprepared for academy life and the Huntsman profession, he was ironically well-suited to the physical rigors he was bound to encounter.  As the Arc family was known for regular camping trips in Mistral, Jaune was clearly able to develop a high degree of physical fitness and maintained a healthy lifestyle, standing as a surprisingly talented natural athlete.  His past as an outdoorsman left him prepared with the harsh conditions of the battlefield, and his formal training ironed out his athleticism to leverage his body for fighting.  Easily identified by the blonde hair and blue eyes shared by his family, Jaune stood at a robust 6’1”and sported an athletic, muscular build.  In terms of physical performance, his primary attributes were strength and agility, expressed through his joint use of powerful stalwart stances and dynamic full-body maneuvers.  Even before his training truly began, Jaune proved himself to be remarkably strong, deflecting aside a Deathstalker’s pincer during his initiation and holding back an Ursa Major’s mauling swipe in the Forever Fall forest.  After proper training and combat experience, Jaune grew into a true physical heavyweight, his might, while not matching juggernauts like James Ironwood and Hazel Rainart, being easily comparable to heavy hitters like Yang Xiao Long and Nora Valkyrie.  He has sent an Ursa flying with a shield bash, launched grown humans several yards into the air, briefly held back the crushing weight of the Nuckelavee’s hooves, and supported the weight of a Sabyr and Tyrian Callows when they held onto his shield, in addition to various displays of strength-based swordsmanship.  In the realm of agility, Jaune may not have been a talented gymnast, but he more than made up for it in grounded speed and parkour even in heavy armor, traversing the battlefield with powerful jumps and running charges while avoiding injury with combat rolls and sidestep evasions.  He has kept pace with most of his teammates without too much strain, dodged boulders thrown by a Petra Gigas, blindsided the Nuckelavee by rushing in while it was distracted, and even moved fast enough to intercept Neopolitan’s lunge at Atlas Academy.  Though tripped up in sparring with Vine Zeki, he was able to effectively freerun with the aid of his shield through the treacherous landscape of the Solitas tundra while perusing the Hound.  Jaune’s reflexes and dexterity were easily his least developed attribute due to his lack of training, though he was by no means slow or crude.  Though he favored simple hack and stab bladework, his attacks were still executed with great precision when needed, aiming for one-hit kills.  Defensively, he had no difficulty responding to projectiles or other incoming attacks, notably raising his shield in time to block most of the obsidian shards Cinder Fall threw through one of the Evacuation Central Location portals despite being right next to the portal at the time.

While Jaune’s high degree of physical performance was extremely impressive even compared to other Huntsmen, easily his most valuable physical characteristic was his incredible resiliency, stamina, and tolerance for pain and injury.  Evan accounting for his large Aura reserves and the properties of his Semblance, the hits that Jaune has worked through are extremely impressive feats.  In his initiation, Jaune, despite having no active Aura to protect him, endured the impact of being pinned to a tree after being launched into the woods, and showed no sign of injury until he got scratched by a tree branch a few minutes later.  In Forever Fall, he suffered a serious beating from Cardin Winchester that left him with a bruised face, yet he was able to engage the Ursa Major almost immediately afterwards, soaking up more hits and ultimately decapitating the creature.  During Team RNJR’s journey to Haven, Jaune worked through a flying rock to the face, physical combat strikes from Tyrian Callows, and numerous mule kicks and blows from the Nuckelavee, yet his Aura never broke or even flickered.  In fact, the first time Jaune’s Aura was ever seen breaking in serious combat was when he expanded it to help shield Nora from a punch Caroline Cordovin’s Colossus mech suit (which I’d like to remind you was a giant robot designed to fight kaiju-sized Grimm), overtaxing his Aura and slamming him into a boulder.  His stamina displayed itself during the Fall of Beacon, the Battle of Haven, and the Battle of Mantle, all of which were long term conflicts that he fought all through yet remained vital and fresh by the end.  In Atlas, Jaune was slammed into a wall by Salem after he burned through his Aura amping Ren, yet was completely uninjured and stayed vital during their escape from the Monstra.  It wasn’t until he was forced into close proximity to Cinder Fall’s explosion in the Evacuation Central Location that his Aura broke again, and yet he still had enough fight left in him to regain his feet and attempt to escape.  Quite simply, Jaune has spent the bulk of his career as a human punching bag, yet he’s still going strong, wars of attrition being his bread and butter.  Jaune was unfortunately saddled with his share of mental hang-ups, his early hubris leading to him making reckless calls before wising up while his traumatic experiences, especially Pyrrha’s death, left him with an inferiority complex that led to him overextending in a misguided idea of sacrificing for his friends.  Fortunately, the influence of those same friends helped Jaune learn from his experiences and maintain his composure, trading away the macho badass for an incredibly strong-willed vanguard.  Even after being forced to kill Penny Polendina following Cinder Fall’s mortal wound, Jaune Arc never faltered, holding his ground against the Fall Maiden’s savage onslaught despite the grief-stricken tears in his eyes.

Reflecting the irony of being physically prepared for Huntsman life despite having no training, Jaune Arc consistently supplemented his well-honed physique with heavy combat armor, providing him from a degree of protection from the dangers of the world of Remnant.  He initially wore only a simple breastplate and shoulder pads, though like the rest of his skill set, his kit evolved and expanded over time.  During his time as an Atlesian Huntsman, he wore a full-plated gold-trimmed cuirass, pauldrons, and gauntlets over a black high collared shirt, while his lower body was garbed in blue jeans and rugged calf-high boots.  His earlier armor upgrade from an unnamed Mistral blacksmith was specifically noted to provide superior protection from Grimm claws, so the updated plating provided by Pietro Polendina was certainly just as durable, and very likely greater.  Though he had no protection below the belt (seriously dude, Adrian needs cousins. get a cup! 😊), the lack of heavy plating still allowed full freedom of movement, maintaining Jaune’s agility.  Easily the most sentimental wardrobe component was Pyrrha Nikos’s red sash adorning his belt, a final reminder of his lost love.

RANKING: Tier 2, Peak Human Fitness

Despite a severe lack of training at the start of his career, Jaune Arc still started out as a prime human specimen, and his numerous ordeals have propelled him to the Huntsman physical apex.  He is a solidly built athlete with powerful performance levels in all areas that can match or even exceed many of his peers, and supplements this with both an extraordinary level of endurance and some of the best armor we’ve seen in the setting so far.  While unassuming at first glance, Jaune’s physique serves as the vehicle for a one-man war of attrition, winning by leveraging his capabilities to stay alive and wait for the perfect opportunity to strike.  But much like his friend Ruby Rose, Jaune’s greatest asset as a physical combatant is his resolve, maintaining his composure even in the face of staunch resistance.  He won’t give up, he won’t break, no matter what.

MARTIAL

Jaune Arc’s primary weapon was Crocea Mors, a collapsible heater shield paired with an arming sword which was originally carried by his great-great grandfather during the Great War, eighty years before the Fall of Beacon.  Despite being an antique compared to what his classmates carried, the weapon remained in excellent condition when Jaune took it with him to Beacon, and it has been further modified and upgraded as he continues his adventures.  The sword was an approximately two and a half foot long double-edged blade outfitted with a golden crossguard and a lengthened handgrip wrapped in blue leather.  The shield, when fully extended, had a rough area of 2.5 square feet and featured an opening at the top to house the sword, its primary feature being to convert into the blade’s scabbard when not in use.  Following modifications from an unnamed Anima blacksmith, the sheath was upgraded to include retractable sharpened edges that could extend upward, transforming it into a stout zweihänder with a heavier blade, enabling far more powerful strikes in combat.  The most recent additions to the shield came from Pietro Polendina in Atlas, who outfitted it with hard-light and gravity Dust generators. The former extended barriers to either edge to improve Jaune’s protective zone, while the latter functioned as a combat repulsor.  Appropriate given its original owner was a soldier rather than a Huntsman, Jaune’s weapon remains one of the simplest and most utilitarian in the setting, form reflecting function even with its various upgrades.  While perfectly capable of slaying Grimm, Crocea Mors was built for war.

As he had never attended a formal combat school nor had grown up with real-world dangers to address, Jaune Arc was woefully unprepared for his early education at Beacon Academy, enrolling on the back of forged transcripts and having amateurish understanding of the field’s basics.  Despite this, Jaune was fortunate enough to survive his initiation, and his ability to coordinate Pyrrha Nikos, Lie Ren, and Nora Valkyrie in their takedown of a Deathstalker earned him leadership of Team JNPR.  While his early blunders were quite obvious, falling behind in his studies and regularly getting stomped in sparring, Ozpin’s early assessments of the boy’s potential were eventually proven to have merit following his conflict with Cardin Winchester.  After a peptalk with Ruby Rose and his successful killing of an Ursa Major in Forever Fall fed him some crow, Jaune accepted Pyrrha’s offer of private tutoring and began to properly develop as a fighter.  Under her tutelage, Jaune slowly grew into a capable swordsman and began taking his responsibilities as leader more seriously, eventually qualifying for the Vytal Festival and leading his team to victory against Team BRNZ.  While the Fall of Beacon and Pyrrha’s subsequent death cut his formal training short, Jaune continued to train rigorously with her prerecorded lectures during Team RNJR’s journey to Haven Academy and maintained his skill by sparring with his comrades.  But more than anything else, Jaune’s greatest growth came through the trial by fire that was the war with Salem, the threats he encountered forcing him to learn quickly and build his skill set through experience.  Appropriately for a beginner warrior growing through trial and error in the field, Jaune Arc’s fighting technique was an exceedingly simple and direct sword-and-board method, emphasizing the baseline reliability of the practical benefits of his weapon set.  He primarily relied on his shield as the foundation of his technique, using it to intercept or deflect incoming attacks.  He alternated between stalwart stonewall stances and active pushback deflections, holding his ground against everything from gunfire to pouncing Grimm while disrupting their own attacks with sweeps and bashes.  When he did choose to take the offensive initiative, his bladework consisted of a simple yet powerful array of slashes, cleaves, and thrusts, aiming for one-hit kills.  Together, the two weapons enabled a defense-and-counter fighting style, following up his solid blocking sequences with quick sword attacks to quickly disable or kill the target.  Though friendly and kind, Jaune never settled for half-measure, always decapitating, dismembering, amputating, impaling, or otherwise seriously injuring his target.  When utilizing Crocea Mors in its greatsword form, Jaune’s bladework became less refined yet far more powerful, using hacking chops to deal brutal damage, though at the cost of his defensive stance.  Despite lacking variation as a swordsman, Jaune’s simple and loose style was extremely adaptable, allowing him to accommodate to virtually any situation or opponent.  This technique was reinforced by his fluid use of his special abilities, most notably his Dust loadout and Semblance to augment his maneuvers.  However, Jaune has displayed little in terms of alternative disciplines.  Despite possessing a strong physical component in his style, he has never been seen employing hand-to-hand combat in any capacity, and his knowledge of firearms began and ended with blocking bullets.  That being said, he has engaged opponents who do use these methods and survived, most notably Tyrian Callows and James Ironwood, so he clearly knows how to combat them even if he lacked proficiency in using them himself.  Furthermore, he proved to be a competent mounted fighter, delivering strikes from Pietro Polendina’s hoverbike very effectively in Mantle.

For all the strides he made in his training and advancement in spite of his inexperience, what truly put Jaune Arc in step with his peers was his surprising natural talent as a tactician and strategist.  Humbled by his first semester’s failings, Jaune recognized his limitations as one of the least developed fighters of his class, and instead focused on pouring his energies into learning to circumvent them with the aid of his teammates and friends.  While his lack of book smarts would make the tactical display out of his element, his ingenuity and ability to recognize the strengths and weaknesses of both his troops and his enemy’s, even under dangerous high-stress situations, more than made up for it.  Jaune Arc was not a grand strategizing general; he was a boots-on-the-ground frontline commander, and in his tactics, he heavily emphasized adapting to and subverting the opponent while holding out for the long term.  He would open defensively to give him time to assess the threat and give his allies the opportunity to probe for weaknesses.  Once an opening was discovered, he would order a swift and decisive response to exploit it, often by disabling the opponents’ defenses and weapons and forcing them to expose the Achilles Heel.  Against the Deathstalker, Jaune worked with Pyrrha to defend against its claws while Ren weakened the stinger, and upon seeing this had Pyrrha sever it with her shield before propelling Nora into the air to drive it in.  Team RNJR’s battles with the Petra Gigas and Nuckelavee played out similarly, with the beasts ultimately being killed by keeping their limps tied up while leaving its main body vulnerable to Nora’s blows.  The Nuckelavee battle demonstrated Jaune’s ability to apply this thinking to wars of attrition as well, as he and Ruby were able to land several critical strikes on the legs while the head was distracted, wearing it down as they cooked up a decisive finishing strategy.  As far as more intelligent opponents went, Jaune demonstrated his talents during the Vytal Festival match against Team BRNZ, ordering a retreat following the initial exchange before quickly reengaging, working with Ren and Pyrrha to fend off the bulk of the team and flush out May Zedong’s sniper nest so that Nora could blow her to Kingdom Come.  While battlefield situations were Jaune’s specialty, he was still capable of contributing to larger strategic operations, and more importantly, demonstrated an ability to reevaluate and adapt if his plans were derailed.  The best example of this was the confrontation with Caroline Cordovin in Argus.  The plan was to commandeer an Atlas airship by having Weiss Schnee pretend to return home alone before she and Maria Calavera overpowered the pilots and picked up the others, hiding their return by sending Blake Belladonna to disable the relay tower.  However, their hand was tipped when Blake was ambushed by Adam Taurus before she could complete her sabotage, and Cordovin responded by unleashing the gigantic Colossus mech suit.  Despite this colossal setback (pun completely intended), Jaune quickly put together a plan of engagement, exploiting the mech’s bulk by having Weiss, Ren, Qrow Branwen and Calavera harass Cordo and chip away at her defenses while nullifying her firepower by evading her attacks.  Though the final blow was delivered through Ruby’s initiative rather than Jaune’s his overall game plan and trust in his teammates still enabled them to survive and disable the weapon despite the shock of their original strategy failing.

However, while Jaune was a fantastic field leader and achieved several impressive victories, most of these were done through the strengths and abilities of his allies rather than his own.  Jaune’s inexperience and underdeveloped technique left him at a disadvantage whenever he was confronted by a skilled opponent in single combat, his success predicated on his versatility and tactical supremacy rather than his ability to fight.  His first true victory against the Ursa Major demonstrated his tenacity and the raw talent he did have, but he nearly lost his entire Aura during the scuffle and survived only due to Pyrrha’s interference.  Despite pulling his own weight in the Vytal Festival and against Tyrian Callows, his personal performance mostly amounted to soaking up punishment while everyone else tried to make headway.  While Jaune had improved significantly by the time of the Battle of Haven, the psychological strain of his experiences combined with Cinder Fall’s posturing triggered an outburst from the still-grieving Jaune, who recklessly charged the Fall Maiden with his greatsword.  The only reason Jaune lasted as long as he did was because Cinder drew out the fight to play with her food, the closest thing he made to headway being when he scored a superficial graze on her face mask after she was stunned by Ruby’s Silver Eyes.  Fortunately, Jaune managed to get into a much healthier headspace following his time in Atlas and learned from his experiences.  In addition to improving his calm under fire, he managed to apply a solid measure of his tactical sensibilities to personable combat.  This was where his heavy defensive focus truly started to express itself, shifting his focus to protecting himself, his allies, and his charges and only attacking when the blow could efficiently end the immediate threat.  While his core technique was underdone, his tandem use of his alternative abilities allowed him to adjust to different situations even if he couldn’t win himself.

In Mantle, Jaune slew numerous Grimm in the streets by intercepting their attacks before immediately striking back, notably impaling a Sabyr after it jumped onto his shield and later throwing a hard-light Dust grenade into a pack of Sabyrs for them to faceplant into.  While unsuccessful at evading Vine Zeki while sparring in Atlas, he achieved greater success when he fended off Flynt Coal’s Killer Quartet, enduring the assault before closing in and overpowering him.  Against Neopolitan in the Atlas Academy dorms, Jaune managed to intercept her running charge and blew her backward with his gravity Dust repulsor, though he and the rest of his team were ultimately outmaneuvered by the assassin and forced to flee with the arrival of the Atlas security forces.  When confronting James Ironwood two days later, Jaune immediately followed up Emerald Sustrai’s disarmament and kick with a slashing sequence, and though the general was able to stop him and counter, Jaune immediately turned it around with his repulsor, giving Oscar Pine and opportunity to run in and attack himself.  In these various encounters, Jaune demonstrated great skill and fending off direct aggressors and using their energies against them, even when fighting opponents far above his own level like Ironwood.  Rather than just enduring an attack, he brought it to a halt by disrupting their forward advance and landing devastating counters.  Conversely, Jaune was less successful against more subversive opponents who could outmaneuver and undercut him, which is what he faced against Neo and ran into against Tyrian Callows in Oniyuri.  Furthermore, his success was predicated on his ability to strike at the moment of greatest vulnerability, and if unable to get the drop on his target, he could get into trouble very quickly.  Putting these strengths and limits on display was his second confrontation with Cinder Fall during the exodus to Vacuo.  Despite seeing his old nemesis again and witnessing Yang Xiao Long’s apparent death, Jaune remained composed and focused on ensuring the civilians could escape, only engaging himself when the last were gone.  He opened by flying in and blowing Cinder back with his shield and standing with Weiss and Penny Polendina, prepared to coordinate against their more powerful adversary.  Unfortunately, Cinder divided her assailants and mortally wounded Penny, forcing Jaune to tend to her while Weiss was on her own.  After Penny had Jaune reluctantly kill her to keep the Winter Maiden powers out of Cinder’s hands, an enraged Fall lashed out, but Jaune, despite his extreme emotional stress, stood his ground and repelled her.  However, Cinder recovered too quickly for Jaune to properly retaliate, and he was quickly overwhelmed when the Fall Maiden destroyed his weapon.

RANKING: Tier 5, Standard Application

Jaune Arc’s inexperience and limited performance in single combat make it clear that he is not a master, but he still possesses a well-rounded and comprehensive skill set that covers his bases and improves his overall viability.  His greatest asset is his intelligent tactical analysis on the battlefield, enabling him to adapt to situations and exploit weaknesses, even if someone else lands the killing blow instead of him.  In single combat, he can contend with superior martial artists by leveraging his techniques to nullify their offensives and hit them where they don’t expect, though his battles with Cinder and Neo prove that this has its limits.  Appropriately, Jaune Arc wears Pyrrha Nikos’s influence on his sleeve, both being talented albeit thinly spread fighters who compensate for their lack of development by using all of their skills together.  The difference is that where Pyrrha built a special weapon to enable all of her attack options in her technique, Jaune supported his basic technique with strong support gadgets and good armor to provide a margin for error.  Jaune’s feats make him seem better than he actually is, but unlike Volume 1’s macho dofus, Jaune is now aware of this, and has built his tactics accordingly.

SPECIAL

Jaune Arc was a late bloomer when it came to his Semblance, unaware of his abilities even after a year of formal training and thus making him an anomaly among his peers.  It was not until the Battle of Haven that Jaune finally properly manifested his powers.  Named Aura Amp, Jaune’s Semblance allowed him to amplify and enhance the Auras of both himself and others, bolstering the affect of the manifested soul power.  All Auras bless their users with moderate protection from direct injury, mitigating minor wounds, and the ability to utilize their own Semblances.  When amplified by Jaune, these abilities became far more pronounced, strengthening Aura shields far beyond their limits, enhancing the magnitude of a Semblance, and turning the mild regeneration into active healing, this last part easily being the most pronounced of Jaune’s powers.  The first time his Semblance unconsciously activated in the Forever Fall forest, Jaune was able to recover from the beating he took from Cardin Winchester fast enough to immediately engage the Ursa Major. This went even further when he properly unlocked his Semblance at Haven.  After Cinder Fall impaled Weiss Schnee in order to spitefully torment him, Jaune’s emotional distress over another friend being severely injured on his watch, coupled with his need to save Weiss’s life finally caused his powers to properly manifest.  Despite the fact that she had clearly gone into shock and was suffering from serious blood loss, Weiss was able to regain consciousness after mere minutes of treatment, and after a few more had regained enough of her energies to Summon a Queen Lancer and fight through the remainder of the battle.  Making this even more impressive was that Jaune was able to accomplish this instinctively and with little to no effect on his stamina.  Jaune refined his abilities for active use in the following weeks, to the point where he could casually heal the Huntsman Dudley’s broken arm on the Argus Limited, and later treated the battered Oscar Pine after rescuing him from the Monstra.  Beyond healing, Jaune’s ability to amplify Auras allowed him to empower the barriers of others to help them endure incoming attacks.  In Argus, he bolstered himself and Nora Valkyrie to brace against the Colossus’s punch, and thought disabled by the hit, Jaune’s power still saved their lives.  On a smaller though no less impressive scale, Jaune’s amplification proved instrumental in allowing Penny Polendina to resist the effects of Arthur Watts’ computer virus, allowing her human soul to overpower her circuitry.  Most impressive by far was Jaune’s ability to enhance others’ Semblances by adding his strength to their own.  Lie Ren was his most common partner in this, empowering Tranquility to the point where Ren could mask the entire Argus Limited train and whole mobs of civilians in Mantle, as well as conceal at least ten trained Huntsmen from detection by whole armies of Grimm.  When Penny nearly succumbed to Watts’ virus, Jaune’s enhancement of Weiss’s Glyphs allowed them to restrain her long enough to offer aid.  However, Jaune’s Semblance was not without its limits.  Prolonged use could drain his own Aura quickly, and even his own substantial Aura reserves were not limitless.  Furthermore, his healing powers could not mend all injuries, as Nora’s electric scars and the severity of Penny’s mortal wound from Cinder were beyond his ability to heal.

In addition to his Semblance, Jaune added to his arsenal with Dust gadgets during his time in Atlas, specifically the hard-light panels and gravity repulsor built into Crocea Mors’ shield.  Pioneered by Atlas and therefore costly to obtain outside of it, hard-light Dust is most commonly used in the creation of advanced defensive technology, generating tangible panels of energy strong enough to withstand severe kinetic impacts.  The projectors installed in the edges of Jaune’s shield could create barriers approximately a foot and a quarter wide and running down the full length, effectively doubling his range of protection, improving his ability to function as a defensive wall for himself and his allies.  While the strength limits of these projections has never been tested, I do feel they are at least comparable in strength to the shields created by figures such as Weiss Schnee and Arthur Watts, who were able to hold back the White Fan Lieutenant’s brutish chainsaw blows and block high-caliber gunfire from Due Process respectively.  More contemporary but no less potent, gravity Dust affected forces of push and pull in ways meant to facilitate adhesion, propulsion, and levitation, traits that made it an extremely common fuel in vehicles.  When applied combatively, gravity Dust used these same properties to function as limited telekinetic attacks, usually through the guided manipulation of thrown weapons, enhancing the tactile striking power of manual weapons, or, in the case of Jaune, powerful offensive shockwaves.  Outfitted in the center of the shield, Jaune’s repulsor enabled him to project bursts of power that pushed out in all directions, strong enough to repel charging enemies and deflect attacks though not enough to actively damage his environment.  Though unable to injure Neo, Ironwood and Cinder directly, the repulsor was still strong enough to stagger them, potentially setting up for a follow up strike.  This weapon in particular became Jaune’s most readily utilized combative tool, his favorite tactic being to activate it just as the opponent came within striking distance, essentially delivering shield bashes with a touch of a button.  Despite only recently taking these gadgets up, Jaune quickly became highly profieient in their use, smoothly integrating these abilities into his overall fighting method and together with one another.  In addition to combining the functions to turn his shield into a makeshift hang glider, Jaune could project the gravity waves to push back obstacles while activating the hard-light panels to cover his flanks, using this very method to clear away a pack of Centinels while infiltrating the SDC mine.  This combination tactic further demonstrated Jaune’s approach of utilizing all his abilities together as part of a greater fighting method, getting around his lack of power and skill through versatility and logistics.  At the same time however, Jaune’s Dust abilities had their own individual limits. The hard-light panels were a very specialized tool, and Ironwood’s ability to penetrate Watt’s barriers proves that even special Atlas Dust can’t take a beating forever.  While the gravity repulsor gave Jaune an offensive option, the kinetic output wasn’t sufficient to injure or kill, forcing Jaune to rely on other means to decisively defeat his adversary.

Regarding Jaune’s use of his special abilities in live combat, he clearly emphasized versatility over lethality, sacrificing offensive might for tactical supremacy.  While his Semblance’s properties have been most impressively demonstrated on external subjects, Jaune can and has used the power on himself to potentially decisive effect.  While training in Atlas, Oscar Pine observed that Jaune’s Aura was recovering at a significantly faster rate than usual, which leads me to believe that, similarly to Hazel Rainart’s Numbing Agent, Aura Amp functions as a minor healing factor to help Jaune replenish his energies.  Unlike Rainart, however, Jaune’s active use of his Semblance can allow him to do this on command and more quickly, which, combined with Aura Amp’s healing properties, makes him one of the only characters with the ability to mitigate his own injuries in the field.  Both of his Dust gadgets follow similar patterns of improving Jaune’s survivability, the hard-light shields artificially bolstering his martial defense while the gravity repulsor adds a layer of counteroffensive.  The latter has proven effective and giving Jaune a punch against opponents above his own level, successfully repelling Neopolitan, James Ironwood, and even Cinder Fall TWICE.  However, much like his martial skills, Jaune’s effectiveness as an ethereal combatant is predicated on his breadth of tools rather than their magnitude of his native proficiency. His Semblance is almost entirely a tactical support power, and its various powers still have their limitations that make its efficacy in single combat suspect.  While a number of factors were at play when Jaune was forced to euthanize Penny, the narrative framing makes it clear that the severity of her injuries would have been beyond his ability to repair even if he had time and shelter.  As far as his Dust abilities are concerned, Jaune may make creative integrations of his powers into his fighting style, but neither his shields nor repulsor have the means to decisively end the battle on his terms.  The effectiveness of the gravity repulsor is based around its ability to stagger the opponent and set up for a counterattack, meaning its effectiveness is significantly reduced if the opponent recovers quickly enough to exploit Jaune’s lack of skill as a martial artist.  Against Neopolitan, the attack was able to disrupt her forward charge and launch her down the hall, prompting her to retreat.  Against Ironwood, Jaune had the support of his allies, with Oscar rushing in to attack immediately after the Dust activated, while Weiss and Penny were clearly preparing to do the same against Cinder.  Jaune wasn’t so lucky when he was forced to fight Cinder on his own, their final bout taking place when Weiss was already disabled and Penny was dead.  With only his native abilities as support, Jaune’s final push against Cinder merely provoked her, and her quick recovery allowed the Fall Maiden to rally and shatter his weapon, Jaune’s survival owing entirely to the timely arrival of Winter Schnee.

RANKING: Tier 5, Limited Combat

Much like his fighting abilities, Jaune Arc’s special powers are comprehensive and versatile, but they lack the development to reliably set the battle on his terms.  His Semblance offers various supportive abilities that improve his survivability in the field, while the traits of his Dust loadout add layers to his fighting style, all coming together to cover all of his bases for just about any combat situation.  At the same time, he lacks the developed skill with these powers to properly control the engagement, getting by through the breath of his skill set and his intelligent use of all of his skills.  Rather than mastery of his abilities, Jaune Arc relies on clever gadgets to artificially elevate his fighting style into something greater than the sum of its parts, and his baseline reliability hinges on circumstantial factors.  However, Jaune ‘s limitations do not make him any less of a threat, and his cunning use of the various tricks in his bag means that he can still comfortably engage any situation even if he can’t always win.

OVERALL RANKING: TIER 5, STANDARD HUNTSMAN

Compared to the true masters of his era, Jaune Arc is not a particularly exceptional combatant, but he is still significantly above the rank-and-file.  On the back of his martial skills and special abilities, Jaune stands as the archetypical example of a Tier 5 combatant in the RWBY setting.  His foundation stands on his rock-solid physical attributes, his exceptional athletic performance levels giving him parity with better trained opponents and his inhuman resiliency giving him the ability to work through the hits he needs to take, further supplemented by top tier combat armor.  With his versatile weapon set, solid general purpose fighting technique, potent empowering Semblance, and flexible set of Dust tools, Jaune possesses an extremely comprehensive skill set that leaves him prepared for just about any combat situation, but his lack of developed skill means that none of these attributes are elevated to a degree that can decisively tip the scales of the battle in his favor, leaving him spread thin and vulnerable against more skilled adversaries.  However, being a jack of all trades/master of none does not make one an inept combatant, as Jaune’s attributes still give him a degree of adaptability and grit that many more specialized fighters tend to lack.  Jaune’s saving grace is his tactical mindset, allowing him to circumvent his limitations by using all of his assets, be they his own or those of his allies, together as a layered combative tool to stay alive and win in the long term.  Furthermore, despite his lack of formal training, Jaune has spent almost his entire career either on the battlefield or contending against opponents far above his own level, and he has still survived.

Jaune Arc’s ranking shows that he is not yet a true master combatant and still has a long way to go before truly matching his peers, but his track record also makes it very clear that he is growing very quickly and will undoubtably match or exceed them. He is a rising star, only held back by a series of roadblocks that continue to temper him. Jaune entered Beacon feeling that to be a Huntsman and a hero was to be a mighty warrior standing on his own laurels, though the harsh realities have not only shattered this narrow worldview but also brought out Jaune’s true route to greatness. Similarly, Pyrrha’s death led him to believe that self-sacrifice was all he was good for if it meant giving his friends a chance to survive, but those very friends made it clear that throwing his life away would only hurt them more. Instead of laying waste to armies of enemies as a one man badass, he has grown into a stalwart defender dedicated to surviving to protect those that cannot do so themselves. Rather than the lethal blade of his sword, it is the impenetrable shield in his off hand that has come to define the kind of hero that Jaune Arc is. He will stand firm against evil for the sake of others, holding out as long as he must while searching for ways to end the threat with as little lives lost as possible. The strength of this shield need only be gauged by what it and its wielder has endured. The Breach, the Fall of Beacon, the Battle of Haven, the Atlas Crisis; Jaune Arc survived all this and more, and he has emerged all the stronger and wiser for it. Pyrrha Nikos saw more in Jaune than the rest of them did, and I think it’s safe to say that she could not have been prouder of who he has become; as a Huntsman, as a leader, as a warrior, and more than anything else, as a man.

*originally posted on RoosterTeeth Community page on 06-8-22*

* images taken from RWBY Wiki*

RWBY Combat Analysis

[kali-writes-meta]

Volume 8 Predictions: Salem's Next Move

This is my third post of Volume 8 predictions, after the "I May Fall" analysis and the Monstro= Space BattleshipYamato post. If you want to read those, they're posted earlier on this site.

Volume 8 opens with the ball in Salem's court. What is her immediate goal? We know something about her long-term goals, but what does she want right now? My theory may surprise you, but bear with me.

I'm going to start by making three suppositions. None of them are proven, all of them may be wrong, but there's solid evidence behind each of them.

Supposition A: Salem Doesn't Want To Be Here.

Remember the jokes about Salem's bath being interrupted by Ironwood's video call, and that's why she covered herself in smoke? That basically happened on a larger scale. Salem wants to defeat Atlas eventually, but not now. Both times we saw her in planning meetings with Team WTCH, her focus was on getting the Sword of Destruction from Vacuo.

We heard Cinder tell Neo that Salem planned to attack Atlas only after finishing the Vacuo job. From what we've seen, Salem's original timetable read like this:

1) Absorb Fall Maiden Powers, destroy Beacon, kill Ozpin, capture Crown of Choice Relic;

2) Absorb Spring Maiden Powers, capture Lamp of Knowledge Relic, let White Fang destroy Haven;

3) Absorb Summer Maiden Powers, capture Sword of Destruction Relic, destroy Shade; and then

4) Absorb Winter Maiden Powers, capture Staff of Creation Relic, and destroy Atlas Academy.

Under the original plan, she would have met the Atlesian military with the powers of three Maidens and three Relics at her command, including the Sword of Destruction. As it is she's meeting them with one unstable Maiden and one Relic which hasn't officially reached her hands.

Conclusion: However impressive she looks to us, Salem THINKS she is underpowered for this engagement.

"But what about the Grimm?" you ask. "Salem has an Army, an Air Force, and a Paratrooper Division worth of Grimm at her command." True, but let's examine that aspect more closely.

Supposition B: Salem's resources are finite.

Salem has tremendous power and infinite life, but not infinite resources. Where do Grimm come from? According to both Jinn and what we've seen, the Grimm emerge from the God of Destruction's "blackened pools of annihilation".

But what happens to the pool after the Grimm emerge? Well, thanks to Kevin the Wyvern, we've seen that.

Back in Volume 3 we saw Kevin drip blackened puddles of annihilation on the streets of Beacon, and Grimm emerge from them.

Now look carefully underneath the Grimm when it stands. There's no more puddle. It's been used up.

But that's just a puddle. Pools are bigger. Yes, at first. But let's compare pictures of the God of Destruction's home both in "The Lost Fable" and in the modern day. The cliffs, crags, and outcroppings of glowing purple crystals are the same, but something's happened to the water table. In ancient times there's a deep lake present.

When Emerald and Mercury see that same spot, it's a dry lakebed with a few scattered pools at the bottom of it.

Salem is running out of Grimmpools. And that means Salem is running out of Grimm.

Salem assembled an Army, Air Force, and Paratrooper Division worth of Grimm once by burning through her remaining Grimmpools. (I'm not counting Monstro since he looks like he was literally upcycled) Could she do it twice?

Eh, maybe.

Could she do it three times?

That would be pushing it.

Salem is running out of monsters to surround herself with. Humans have no such limits; we breed and we adapt. I think this fact is what started Salem's quest for alternative energy sources in the first place.

Salem has been forced into attacking Atlas before she has the Relics and the Maiden powers. But she's Salem. This wasn't Plan A, but she's going to make the best of it.

So what do people do when they must attack an entrenched force with what they consider underpowered troops? There's two options.

Option #1 is to go for the throat. Launch an attack with so much fury the enemy doesn't have time to recover before you've ripped their head off. It's a good plan if you've got a clear target. But if you can't reach the unshielded access port that goes straight to the reactor, it's a bust. Salem could do it if she had the Winter Maiden Power, but not without it.

Option #2 is to bluff. Do just enough damage to scare the enemy, then demand tribute and threaten to do worse if your demands aren't met by a certain deadline. I think this is what Salem is going to do.

There's no need to damage Mantle any more. She's proven she can destroy it at her leisure, and Ironwood's proven he doesn't care about Mantle. She has to attack something Ironwood does care about. She has to hurt Atlas or the Fleet parked over Atlas, and she'll probably go for the Fleet. That leads to

Supposition C: Salem's Flying Whale is based on Space Battleship Yamato.

In my last post I speculated that Monstro is based on Space Battleship Yamato. If that's the case, it's going to have some version of the Yamato's signature weapon, the gravity-based Wave Motion Gun, i.e., a death ray. It probably also has the Wave Motion Gun's signature flaw, a charge limit.

The logical thing for Salem to do would be to turn the death ray on the Fleet and incapacitate them. Then, while the death ray is recharging, demand the Maiden, the Relic, and probably Oscar turned over to her at such-and-such place by such-and-such time and she'll leave them alone.

(Wasn't it so nice of Ironwood to arrange all his battleships like ducks in a carnival shooting gallery? I can't even excuse it as a lack of combat experience after what Roman Torchwick did at Beacon.)

She'll have to corrupt or destroy the military before she leaves of course. Humans are excellent at adapting to threats, and they'd come up with something to annoy her given the opportunity. But there's no need to tell them that up front.

And with a deadline and a meeting place, RWBY & Co. have an opening for shenanigans.

[waheelawhisperer]

So I saw a thread on reddit discussing how the Beacon Academy teachers stacked up against the rest of the cast earlier, and while it was full of, uh... interesting takes, it did get me thinking. RWBY doesn't exactly fit into the same strict powerscaling as a lot of other anime/animesque action-oriented shows, but I do think it's possible to separate characters into broad tiers, which is what I'm going to spend this post doing. I'll be analyzing characters based on their performance against human (or at least intelligent humanoid) opponents, so characters like the Hound, Salem, and Penny (who, while she is very much human, don't get me wrong, also has specific combat attributes afforded by her robot body and was initially conceived at least partially as a weapon) still count. Obviously, a lot of things go into a fight beyond pure power levels, so for the purposes of this post, my default assumption is going to be that any character mentioned will be facing a hypothetical opponent in a one-on-one duel where the environment does not specifically favor either fighter, the characters have full access to their respective toolkits, and no outside factors like luck or teammates will influence the fight. I'll also be assuming that no one gets the jump on anyone else unless their fighting styles specifically revolve around ambushing unprepared opponents. I will be drawing my evidence mostly from the following sources: what we actually see in the show (including trailers and character shorts), what we're told in the show (also including trailers and character shorts), and what's listed in the various supplemental materials, including, but not limited to, the official companion book, the Myers novels, and the Amity Arena mobile game card information. As a result, this post will contain spoilers, so read at your own risk. Bear in mind that I don't have access to all supplementary material and thus may miss something from, idk, a livestream that took place five and a half years ago or whatever.

Characters will be listed in rough order within a given tier, but realistically, I feel like any characters I place within the same tier are close enough in combat effectiveness that I could see fights between them going either way, barring specific matchup advantages (e.g. Pyrrha having an advantage against characters that rely on metal equipment).

EX:

Salem

This tier is for the absolute bullshit, namely our Big Bad. Her absurd healing factor alone is enough to let her win basically every matchup purely through attrition, and just in case you thought you could "win" by just tying her to a post and leaving to go do something else, she also comes equipped with actual, literal magic* (an advantage very few people in the world of RWBY have access to, and by "very few" I mean the current number is in the single digits) and is strong enough to overpower both Yang and Hazel, both of whom are at or near the top of RWBY's scale when it comes to purely physical strength, in direct physical combat. She restrains Yang with one arm while Yang uses her whole body to resist and then throws her at another protagonist, all with minimal effort, and then promptly trounces Hazel a moment later, treating the fight almost like an amusing diversion until the very end. It takes a magic nuke to even slow her down, and all a weapon capable of destroying a giant flying sperm whale the size of several city blocks does is... force her to spend some time regenerating. On top of that, Salem can control the Grimm, giving her extra usage in teamfights and an environmental advantage throughout much of Remnant, though I didn't factor that nearly as heavily into my analysis.

The Gods probably also fit into this tier, but since the narrative presents them as capable of doing whatever the hell they want to, without any real, meaningful restrictions, I figured it wasn't worth the bother to try doing any real analysis.

*There are a number of powers in RWBY that function in a similar fashion to magic, but those have defined in-universe rules and limitations. Aura (essentially a soul-powered forcefield) protects its user from damage, heals minor wounds, and reduces the impact of extreme climate. It can be projected through tools and equipment and is, essentially, the resource that allows characters to use other powers, like Semblances and Dust. Semblances are unique manifestations of a character's soul, fueled by Aura, and provide the characters with their individualized power sets. Powers granted by Semblances vary widely, and include anything from super speed to telekinesis to the ability to sense the emotions of others. Dust, on the other hand, is RWBY's generic elemental magic.

S

Raven (with Maiden powers)/Hazel/Raven (without Maiden powers)/Qrow/Tyrian/Clover/Professor Goodwitch/Theodore

Basically, these guys are Remnant's elite. All of them have years of experience and some of the most dramatic feats in the series. You don't take them down without bringing either one of the other characters in this tier or ganging up on them with other high-level fighters.

Raven with the power of the Spring Maiden is probably the strongest human or near-human character we've seen in the show, to the point where her one serious fight ended with her dunking on another Maiden after getting caught by surprise. In her one significant on-screen fight, she's only ever at a major disadvantage once, when hit by an ability designed specifically to counter/steal the Maiden powers, and even then her Aura runs out at the same time Cinder's does, despite the fact that she was previously facing another S-tier fighter while Cinder took on a group of teenagers. In fact, she doesn't seem overly respectful of Cinder in general during their fight, stopping to lecture her while Cinder's obviously vulnerable and having a literal "mine is bigger than yours" contest in the middle of the fight. Raven's fast, smart, adaptable, and willing to make use of the environment, making her a formidable fighter even without the Spring Maiden's powers. Her Semblance (the ability to open portals to people she has an emotional bond with) isn't overly useful in a duel, but it's great in teamfights, allowing her and her allies to reposition at will.

Hazel's next on the list. He's not really all that technically skilled relative to the others on this list (in fact, as a purely technical fighter, he's probably the lowest character on this list and arguably lower than a number of other fighters in lower tiers), but he's also eight feet tall and impervious to pain, so it evens out. Hazel is what you get when you take the stat stick to its logical extreme: in terms of pure baseline physical strength and durability, he beats out probably every (human) character we've seen so far, and on top of that, he has the reach that comes with being 8 feet tall and a Semblance that allows him to block out pain, which in turn lets him inject Dust directly into his body, something noted in-universe to be excruciatingly painful and dangerous under normal circumstances. He also recharges his Aura faster than any other character in the show, meaning that you need a lot of burst damage to put him down. Hazel's favorite spells are Fist and Fireball, and he likes to cast them both at the same time.

In terms of feats, Hazel is somewhat difficult to quantify because we don't see him fight too much outside of the battle of Haven, which was, in general, poorly plotted, managed, and choreographed, outside of a few decent moments. That said, he kicks the crap out of Ren and Nora and knocks Qrow around a bit, so I've slotted him above the Branwen twins, but realistically I could probably make a case for putting him anywhere in this pool. He does get impaled by one of Weiss's summons and just kinda... walks it off, so props to him for that, I guess, though Ozpin seems to have the advantage against him after he takes over for Oscar. Hazel and Tyrian also kill a bunch of Mistral's Huntsmen, which indicates that both of them are pretty strong, but all of it happened offscreen, so we don't know whether they just won straight fights, ganged up on their opponents, ambushed them, etc.

Qrow is the best point of comparison to use for this tier, given that he's the one we see fight the most often. The narrative frequently makes the point that he's an elite Huntsman (member of Team STRQ, noted to be exceptional during their time at Beacon, the best Huntsman Academy on Remnant; one of Ozpin's elite operatives; Tyrian, Salem's hitman, is excited to fight him; only person besides Ruby to use a weapon that's extremely dangerous and difficult to master, etc). I ranked Raven (Maidenless) above him because she's said in Volume 5 to be roughly as strong as he is and gains a brief advantage over him with the use of kicks at Haven, but these two are really, really close. I put Qrow above Tyrian and Clover because he was the one who consistently had the advantage, however slight, in their fights. During their fight in Volume 4, Tyrian is the one on the defensive more often than not, and Qrow is the only one who gains a significant advantage before Auras are broken (the sequence where he shows off his hand-to-hand ability). Sure, Qrow has help in this fight whereas Tyrian doesn't, but his Semblance means that he's arguably better off without it. In his fight with Clover, Qrow's advantage during the sequence between him and Clover before Tyrian joins is hardly decisive, but he does land a kick and a couple scythe hits vs. Clover's singular punch, despite having just facetanked a plane crash that Clover was able to avoid. He's also the one putting in most of the work in the Qrow/Clover/Robyn 3-v-1 against Tyrian, while Clover and Robyn mostly play support roles, striking from afar or binding up Tyrian so Qrow can get a hit in. Finally, Qrow gets points for having one of the most versatile weapons in the series. Between the sword, scythe, tonfa, and gun configurations, Harbinger gives him an option for any range and makes his combat style extremely flexible.

Tyrian, for his part, is a serial killer who killed multiple Huntsmen within Mistral and was apprehended by a joint operation between Mistrali and Atlesian authorities. It's worth noting that the Huntsman who helped arrest him, F. Pickerel, insisted that additional security precautions be implemented even after his capture and was later found dead after Tyrian escaped. On-screen, he's been built up as Qrow's rival, fighting against him 3 times in total and killing someone close to him. As best I can tell from their fights, he's slightly weaker than Qrow and slightly stronger than Clover, though the difference is minimal in any direction and the evidence is hardly conclusive. In fact, I could probably argue that Clover is the stronger of the two based on the Qrow vs. Clover vs. Tyrian fight at the end of Volume 7, though it's worth noting that Tyrian had had the crap beaten out of him previously and had, like Qrow, facetanked a plane crash prior to the fight. Also, Tyrian was the one Salem assigned to hunt down the Spring Maiden, though it's not clear whether he was meant to simply locate her and then phone the gank squad or if his assignment was to just straight up waste her. Either way, it implies that he's at least powerful enough to survive a fight vs. someone with a broken powerset.

Clover is built up throughout volume 7 as Qrow's equal and Atlas's best Huntsman, and his feats throughout the volume certainly seem to bear that out, though there's not a whole lot of data to work with compared to some of the other characters. His final fight of the volume shows that he can go toe-to-toe with both Qrow and Tyrian in a duel, though he actually seemed to have a better showing when the two teamed up against him, putting both of them briefly on the defensive at different points despite repeated attempts to flank him. Clover's also very good in teamfights, the range of his fishing rod... thing... allowing him to restrict opponents' movement and pull them off balance, creating openings for his allies.

Professor Goodwitch has one of the most broken Semblances in the show, capable of large-scale destruction (according to the CFVY books, she can lift large chunks of buildings) unequaled by really anyone we've seen without Maiden powers or some other form of magic. She fights evenly with half-Maiden Cinder in volume 1, defeats the generic mooks even more easily than most of the other notable characters, and is the combat instructor before the Fall of Beacon, which by anime rules means she's also one of, if not the strongest teacher in the school. She hasn't really gotten a big marquee fight like some of the others on this list, but from what the narrative tells us and what little we see in the early volumes, she's clearly a top-tier Huntress.

Basically everything we know about Theodore comes from the CFVY books and his existence has been mentioned, like, once in the show proper and maybe once or twice in Amity Arena, so I can't really go into too much detail, but he's referred to as "the strongest headmaster" or something along those lines, so I've tentatively placed him here.

A

Winter (with Maiden powers)/Cinder (with Maiden powers)/Penny (with Maiden powers)/Winter (without Maiden powers)/Cinder (without Maiden powers)/The Hound/Elm/Taiyang/Ironwood/Maria (young)/Neo/Pyrrha/Penny (without Maiden powers)

This tier represents high-level, experienced fighters that are close to the top of the power scale that haven't quite reached the elite tier yet, but could potentially get there fairly quickly and is where I start to get a bit less confident of my placements. Characters in this tier can be trusted with highly dangerous, challenging, and important missions and typically have gotten at least one good fight designed to show the audience what a badass they are.

The Maidens top the ranks, and honestly I wasn't sure whether to put them at the top of A or the bottom of S, since I think they can go either way, just based on how absurdly broken the Maiden powers are compared to every other power set available in RWBY. All three are competent fighters, but I put Winter above the other two due to her excellent showings against Qrow and Ironwood (during their first fight). Qrow is clearly a cut above Winter during their fight, though Winter is actually the one who lands more meaningful hits, so I didn't rank her in S Tier, but she gets a number of fights against high-quality opponents and acquits herself well in all of them, despite frequently fighting under adverse conditions. Winter hard carries the Ironwood Gank Squad in Volume 8 (seriously, after she joins that fight, she sets up every meaningful event: Nora's hammer blow, setting up everything Oscar does, and then hitting Ironwood with whatever the hell that freaking anime finisher was), is referred to by Watts as "Ironwood's top fighter" (admittedly, after Clover's death), and seems to have a slight advantage over Cinder in the extremely brief Maidenbowl at the end of Volume 8. She does struggle pretty hard against Cinder in V7, though it's worth noting that she was engaging in utterly Maidenless behavior at the time and that the fight started in an enclosed corridor, not really the place you want to fight someone who can throw fireballs, and Cinder caught both her and Penny with an explosion when Winter was trying to close the door. Winter makes very limited use of glyphs during that fight, presumably to avoid risking harm to Penny or Fria, and we see Cinder display a slight advantage in purely melee combat. After that, Cinder takes the battle outside, where Winter is at a distinct disadvantage due to the fact that she can't freaking fly (without use of a summon). Winter also later survives fighting Cinder in melee despite her Aura being depleted, even though Cinder has both her Aura and her Maiden powers, though she gets the crap kicked out of her in the process. My reading of her fights is that Winter would beat Cinder in a fight where neither has a Maiden advantage and the terrain/circumstances allow both of them to use their entire toolkits, so I've put Winter higher on the tier list, especially given the fact that her Semblance is actually like 3 different Semblances in a trench coat.

I would like to emphasize that it is my belief that No Bitches Winter/Cinder are still the best "normal" fighters on this list, given that Winter is, again, "Ironwood's best fighter," and Cinder is clearly intended as her rival throughout the Atlas storyline. I'm not entirely sure how either one of them stacks up against the Hound, which is clearly intended to be a major threat as long as there isn't a convenient statue nearby, but frankly, I feel like the fact that they both have ranged options is enough to put them above it on the list. As for the Hound itself, it has the advantage every time it shows up against the heroes and requires groups of people working together to put it down, but we don't actually see it fight against top-tier competition and it's treated more like an arc villain for the first half of Volume 8 than a significant long-term threat, meant to present the possibility of Grimm Summer and others like her rather than establish itself as a major villain in its own right. I put Elm over the rest of the Ace Ops because her Amity Arena card description says that she's "an excellent agent with a peerless track record" and "the pillar of the team and only second in performance to Clover". She also has to go below Winter, so this is where she wound up.

Taiyang is honestly kinda hard to place. Team STRQ has been hyped to hell and back and Tai trained Yang, but we haven't really seen him fight outside of, like, 1 spar with Yang. If I had more to go on, I'd probably put him up there with Qrow and Raven, but Ruby's dialogue at the beginning of Volume 3 implies that he's been spending more time teaching and less time actively fighting than either of the Branwen twins, though that same dialogue also attributes a great deal of Yang's skill and development as a fighter to him, and he is also positioned as a mentor figure to Yang in Volume 4, so clearly there's something there.

Ironwood is also somewhat difficult to place, given that his main big fight is with Watts, who is... not primarily a combatant, but the fight does take place in an arena where Watts has all the advantages and Ironwood still comes out ahead, despite the fact that Watts outmaneuvers him with the Hard-Light barrier at the end. His Volume 3 fights make it clear that he's a skilled, powerful, and experienced Huntsman, but nothing I've seen from him makes me think that he's on the level of Qrow or the other S-tier characters. His fight with Winter (both Round 1 and Round 2) are hard to get much useful data out of because the first one involves the heroes rolling up with a 6-man gank squad and the second involves both of them fighting while beat to hell (Winter is busy doing her best Commander Shepard impression if Shepard spent all her time in a body brace, has been in combat essentially since the moment she recovered enough to walk without passing out, and hasn't had proper rest since the dinner party in Volume 7, while Ironwood's Aura was already broken once within the past few hours and he opened up the invasion by first flaying the skin off his own arm and then straight-up chopping it off, so neither of them are really in peak condition at that point). Every fight Ironwood's in makes it clear that he's a major threat in close quarters, and Due Process makes him surprisingly maneuverable, but he isn't as versatile as some of the other characters. Ironwood is relatively straightforward and practical by RWBY/anime standards, which fits with his characterization as a soldier, but this comes with pros and cons. The lack of flash that characterizes RWBY combat in general means he leaves fewer exploitable openings in his form (his mindset is another story) and his sheer determination means he's still in a fight as long as he can move, but he also makes minimal use of Dust and his Semblance doesn't really add another dimension to his fighting style, it just makes him better at what he already does and comes with some nasty weaknesses (e.g. tunnel vision) on top of that. Ironwood also drops a minimum of 1 tier whenever he brings out the Gun^3, because sticking 2 guns inside another gun to make a bigger gun is both entirely on brand for Volume 8 Ironwood and the stupidest possible interpretation of the "it's also a gun" meme to ever make it into canon.

The narrative sets Maria up as the premier Huntress of her generation, but a common theme in RWBY is the new blood surpassing the old guard (Qrow mentions Team RWBY being stronger than Team STRQ at the same age, Maria points out that many members of the group have become stronger than she was already, etc.) and Maria struggled a bit against Tock and her gang, who didn't really look like they were on the level of the highest-end fighters in current RWBY during the one time we saw them fight. Taking all that into consideration, I put Young Maria in this tier, but I'll admit the data points are limited and my opinion could potentially be swayed.

Next up, Neo, who, unlike many other characters, actually has a number of significant data points to work with. She opens up by trouncing Yang, who we've already seen punch a robot through a concrete pillar by that point, and then immediately flees from Raven in terror, which tells us that she's: A) a serious badass who's above Team RWBY's Beacon-era level by a fair margin, and B) clearly below the Qrow-tier characters. Later on, we see her take out a whole ship full of soldiers and Ruby's clearly outmatched during their brief clash on top of that airship, but Neo had Roman for backup in that instance. She also had a clear advantage during her rematch with Ruby throughout the fight, effortlessly handles JNOR with the exception of that one punch Oscar lands on her after taking several seconds to run the length of a hallway, and fights evenly against an unarmed Cinder in Volume 6, though it's clear to me that Cinder is holding back during that fight. I think Neo's fairly placed at the lower end of this tier, as we consistently see her win vs. characters placed lower and struggle against characters placed higher. It's also worth taking into account the way she gets cocky and takes her time to savor a kill, which has bitten her in the ass no less than 3 times so far (twice against Ruby and once against Yang).

Pyrrha is in this tier based on the combination of demonstrable strength/skill, experience, and a Semblance that gives her a massive matchup advantage against nearly every other character in the series. That said, she's no slouch without it, since she managed to win the Mistral Regional Tournament 4 years in a row and graduated top of her class at Sanctum Academy with such minimal use of her Semblance that its properties weren't widely known despite her being enough of a celebrity to have her face on a cereal box. In addition, her Amity Arena card bios describe her as "A gifted warrior born and raised for greatness" and "an accomplished marksman", something Rifle Pyrrha's bio notes is often overlooked. She's also noticeably willing to fight without weapons at all, given her tendency to work in throws, either unarmed or assisted by her weapon (see her fights vs. Cinder and CRDL). Not only will she dazzle you with her swordplay and marksmanship, she'll just yeet you across the damn arena if she feels like it.

In terms of on-screen feats, Pyrrha qualifies for the Vytal Festival as a first-year student (and makes it to the singles rounds), defeats Team CRDL (themselves strong enough to both qualify for the Vytal Festival and make it to the doubles round) in a 4-v-1 spar without noticeable difficulty, and fights evenly with Penny with minimal use of her Semblance (and, of course, literally rips Penny to pieces once Emerald makes things worse on purpose). She also holds her own against Cinder for a while at the end of Volume 3. While that fight ultimately goes against her, she makes a credible showing and demonstrates what her Semblance is capable when she really cuts loose. Frankly, I've put her here based mostly on her actual stats and technical fighting ability, rather than the power of her Semblance, and I think she could move up in this tier fairly readily if we'd gotten a good example of her fighting without hiding her abilities that wasn't against a Maiden.

Penny was designed as a weapon and her 1.0 version fights evenly against Pyrrha, regularly wrecks airships, and curbstomps whichever mostly-forgettable members of Team CRDL she ends up fighting in the Vytal Festival Tournament. Her 2.0 version is even stronger, adding flight (which is a massive tactical advantage all by itself) and bigger laser beams, and, most importantly, bigger hair. On top of that, she comes with a top-of-the-line sensor suite that lets her avoid sneak attacks on at least 2 occasions (her fight with Cinder in Amity Colosseum and when the Happy Huntresses are sneaking up on the truck she's guarding), and, as a robot with a soul, gets all the benefits of Aura with the additional bonus of the ability to repair or replace any damaged non-critical body parts without too much difficulty. She's also designated the official protector of Mantle, and is apparently at least good enough at fending off frequent Grimm incursions over a wide area that Mantle's populace views her in a positive manner.

B

Harriet/Adam/Yang/Vine/Marrow/Oobleck/Port/Robyn/Vernal/Mercury

This tier is for the fighters who are strong, but are clearly presented as having either a lower ceiling or more room to grow than the ones who should already be considered elite in some capacity. The remaining Ace-Ops are all in this tier and are more-or-less interchangeable in terms of placement, though I gave Harriet the nod over Vine due to Vine being the first member of the team to fall at the end of Volume 7, whereas Harriet generally makes her opponents work for it, and Vine the nod over Marrow due purely to experience, since Marrow's the newbie of the group. That said, I'm not exactly married to these rankings, seeing as the Ace-Ops in general have pretty forgettable showings and have a fairly mediocre win/loss record due to being positioned against the heroes on the few occasions where they actually get to fight human opponents instead of Grimm.

I'm sure some people (the ones who haven't been paying attention to the show) will probably be surprised to see Yang this high, but I'm firmly convinced that she's one of those "naturally talented with room to grow" fighters that simply lacks the experience against intelligent humanoid opponents to maximize her potential at this point in the story. Her fight versus Neo makes it clear that she isn't truly elite yet, but she's clearly the best of Team RWBY, given that she's the one they picked to advance to the singles rounds of the Vytal Festival Tournament, consistently does the bulk of the work in teamfights (to the point where Blake's entire fucking fighting style is just "support Yang" at this point despite Blake being a legitimately talented fighter in her own right. More on that later...), and has the best overall win/loss record of any of her teammates. Certain segments of the fandom like to call her the dumb brute force fighter (I have my own theories regarding the reasons why, but I'm not going to go into them here. It's certainly not because these people are good at breaking down fights or have a strong understanding of pattern recognition, strategy, or tactics), but she's actually very technically skilled and tactically adept, on top of having a very powerful Semblance and being hella maneuverable compared to your average tank/bruiser. I could write a whole-ass post (and probably will) on how Yang is far, far smarter and more skilled than even some of her supporters give her credit for, but this post is longer than a Kal'tsit monologue as it is, so that's a problem for future me.

I put the teachers in this tier because during the point where they're relevant to the show, they're clearly presented as stronger than the students, given that Port and Oobleck clear out an arena full of Grimm that were giving even strong students trouble and Oobleck wastes a bunch of Paladins, whereas basically all the named students had to bust their asses to take down 2 Paladins at Beacon and the one in Painting the Town needed all 4 of Team RWBY to defeat. That said, we don't have a whole lot of data and these two were nearly non-factors after the narrative departed Beacon, so I'm not entirely sure how they stack up now. I think Yang, at least, is stronger than they are at this point, but I'm not 100% sure about her teammates.

Vernal is here mainly because she performs some Kobe-level dunks on Weiss during the Battle of Haven, but she does precisely fuck-all otherwise, and Weiss literally fights as stupidly as possible the entire time, so idk how useful any of that is. The fact that she's Raven's clear second-in-command in the Social Darwinist Bandit Collective implies some level of competence, but the bandits are such ass at doing anything useful that she doesn't exactly have to clear a high bar to earn the position. I think she's meant to be fairly good in-universe, but also close to her ceiling, and I could easily justify dropping her to the tier below.

Robyn is an odd one and hard to properly rank, to be honest. She's so heavily specialized for long-range combat that her effectiveness goes up exponentially when paired with a tank (case in point: the utter destruction of Tyrian and the brief shot of her fighting alongside Qrow vs. the droids in Volume 8. She stays very close to him in Volume 8 specifically and lets both his body and the reach of his scythe protect her from anything closing while she takes the mooks apart, while in the fight vs. Tyrian, she picks her moments carefully and is damn near always positioned so that her tank line is in position to intercept Tyrian if he tries to go after her*, pulling off Doublelift Lucian jukes and bouncing her skillshots off her own allies, thus demonstrating within a singular fight that she has more actual testicles than every other ADC main in history despite being a woman), but she's repeatedly shown to be vulnerable in melee in comparison and thus isn't someone I'd view as particularly effective in duels. That said, her brief skirmish with Yang and Blake shows that she's competent enough in melee to adequately defend herself against a couple of strong opponents who, to be fair, were trying not to seriously hurt her. I'd go more in-depth about that skirmish specifically, but 2 minutes of googling gave me one video that was lower quality than the average line of Fate/Stay Night hentai prose and a bunch of clickbait videos and reddit posts whining about how Ironwood deserved better and I'm too lazy to actually find and watch the episode on Rooster Teeth's website.

*When she isn't, it's because her tanks are actively CCing the enemy, so she's as safe as she can realistically be as long as she doesn't walk into melee.

Finally, Mercury was trained by a notorious assassin and then killed that assassin, which is presumably a pretty solid baseline, and then on top of that is specifically recruited as the muscle for Cinder's group and fights well enough versus Yang that he came very close to beating her during the Vytal Festival tournament. My interpretation of the fight is that it was a legit victory for Yang, since Emerald could easily have pulled the same trick if Yang lost to obtain a very similar effect and Mercury has an "oh, shit, I'd better take this seriously" moment when Yang almost wins by ring-out, but I don't know whether it's ever confirmed that Mercury outright threw or not, so I could easily be wrong. On top of that, he absolutely handled Coco and Yatsuhashi, two students who are implied to be pretty damn strong themselves.

C

Blake/Torchwick/Weiss/Nora/Ren/Emerald/Coco/Yatsuhashi/Sun/Ilia/Ruby/Sienna/Fox

This tier is for combatants who are honestly pretty damn good by the standards of Remnant at large and are clearly powerful relative to your average student and even some licensed Huntsmen, but are still a bit lower on the power scale relative to the experienced combatants who serve as major heroes and villains who represent the growth trajectory and potential of the protagonists. I'm going to go on a little bit of a tangent here to discuss how Team RWBY stacks up in comparison to both their age group and the population of Huntsmen in Remnant overall, using the Vytal Festival as an example. The show does a lot of work, both in the background and the foreground, to build Team RWBY up as a group of prodigies. Ruby gets into Beacon 2 years early, Weiss is apparently top of the class at the time of the Vytal Festival, Blake was going on combat missions before she was old enough to get a driver's license, and Yang, as l've already established, is a better fighter than any of the aforementioned three. Iirc one of the CFVY books specifically note that Team RWBY impressed the student body by taking down the giant Nevermore during initiation, and while my memory is fuzzy, that's entirely plausible to me, given the way we see the same types of Grimm that Team RWBY absolutely shred on a regular basis giving serious trouble to the "average" students during the Battle of Beacon, to the point where a number of those students straight-up die.

On top of that, Team RWBY qualifies for the Vytal Festival Tournament as first-year students. The tournament has only 32 slots (calculated based on the number of rounds we see on-screen) and is open to students of all age groups, meaning that Team RWBY not only managed to beat out students nearing graduation to qualify, but also reached the singles round in that stacked field. To give you an idea of what the "average" Huntsman/student level is like, consider the following fact: Team CRDL, who are a group of first-years who are presented as decidedly inferior to the protagonist group (Pyrrha trashes them in a 4-v-1, they run from an Ursa that fucking Jaune manages to kill after Pyrrha ghosts him through it, and they notably don't try to start shit with anyone they think will fight back), not only qualified for the tournament, they made it into the doubles stage. Yes, I know the real reason for their appearance was because someone needed to lose to Penny and they presumably already had the models, but in-universe, they have legitimate accomplishments. Later on, we see the protagonists consistently outperform actual licensed Huntsmen (e.g. Dee and Dudley, although it must be said that those two are down at the bottom of the barrel), so despite the way Team RWBY sometimes look weak in the Maya era, it's mostly because they're throwing hands with and alongside the absolute best fighters on Remnant.

Anyway, I put most of the remaining protagonists at the top of this tier. I view Blake as the best fighter in this group despite her absolutely atrocious showings in recent volumes because she: A) demonstrated some serious skill earlier in the series, like when she trounced Torchwick on the train, and B) at least successfully plays the support role very effectively and works fantastically with Yang. I have no actual proof of this, but I hypothesize that Blake's on-screen feats have suffered because the choreographers/animators have a hard time figuring out what to do with Gambol Shroud and don't use it as creatively as Monty did early on (watch the Black Trailer, she pulls the goddamn ribbon to fire the gun to redirect the blade, of all things. Early Blake was fucking wild). Even so, she has more serious combat experience than most of the others in this tier and is extremely slippery on top of that. Her physical strength is impressive enough to let her yeet Yang like a MLB fastball and swing around like goddamn catgirl Tarzan, and even her clones pack a punch when spiked with Dust.

Weiss has a fantastic toolkit, but hasn't been great at using it on screen because she's been the designated Renji for about half the series and has jobbed to hell and back starting as early as Volume 2. She's gotten better about this as she's gotten more real-world experience, culminating in her solo win vs. Marrow in Volume 7, and it's clear that she was the most sheltered of the main 4. Frankly, Weiss has the highest ceiling in teamfights out of anyone in this tier by a fair margin, given the absurd versatility of her Semblance and her aptitude for Dust manipulation, but she struggles a bit with conditioning early on and her lack of experience hurts her. Her performance has gone up as she settles into a support role, and I honestly think she's the fighter on her team with the most room to grow.

Ren and Nora seem clearly in the "really, genuinely talented and skilled, but weaker than RWBY" category, but their experience gives them a solid edge vs. most of the others in this tier, especially since unlike Coco and Yatsuhashi, who are talented and experienced themselves, they aren't specifically specialized for either range or melee.

Ruby's a bit lower than the other protagonists because she clearly optimized her build for fighting Grimm and consistently struggles against human opponents. Her lack of hand-to-hand combat skill is shown as a weakness in Volume 2 and then brought up again in Volume 5, and she's the only member of her team who doesn't outright defeat her opponent during the fight against the Ace-Ops at the end of Volume 7, but she successfully outsmarts Neo twice and is probably the best on her team at taking on Grimm, as well as the one with the best leadership skills.

Torchwick is high on the list because he fought well against Blake and Sun in Volume 1 and then smacked Ruby around in Volume 3, but Blake crushed him in their rematch and iirc he never even unlocked his Semblance. That said, he's apparently Vale's biggest criminal and a genuinely competent fighter, so I think this is an appropriate placement for him.

As for the rest, I kind of just lumped them together because they've all shown that they're better than the average student, but most of them have very few actual fights/screentime to go off of, and I was too tired to spend several minutes trying to figure out which minor character was slightly better at fighting than other minor characters.

D

Jaune/Ghira/Neptune/Scarlet/Sage/Team FNKI/Team CRDL/Team ABRN/Team BRNZ/Team NDGO/Albain brothers/Watts/Melanie/Miltia/Dee and Dudley

This is the tier for people who have combat training but aren't impressive enough to end up in a higher tier. Jaune has made great strides, but he isn't really exceptional yet, and Ghira is basically about as dangerous as you'd expect a 7-foot GigaChad beefcake with panther claws to be, but that's really not as big of a deal as it sounds in the world of RWBY. Really, anyone with some level of Huntsman training or combat experience that hasn't truly distinguished themselves should fit in here, and as such the tier has the highest range of variance since a whole ton of minor characters can fit inside it.

Mook Tier

Branwen Tribe/White Fang goons/Atlesian robots

Basically anyone who can be a threat to your average civilian who lacks training or Aura, but otherwise mostly exists to give the heroes or villains someone to beat up.

Civilians

The majority of Remnant's population, approximately as dangerous as any randomly selected group of people from Earth. Lacking in training or any kind of superpower.

There are a few characters I didn't rank on purpose, and probably several I forgot, but at this point it's late and I'm tired and I don't want to write much more, so I'm just going to go over Summer, Oscar/Ozpin, and Velvet and call it a night.

Summer should probably go in either A or S based on the fact that she's a member of Team STRQ and her family clearly considers her a great Huntress, but we know so little about her that giving any sort of accurate evaluation of her combat abilities is impossible.

Not really sure where to put Oscar/Ozpin since Ozpin's capabilities depend at least in part on his host body and drawing a line between Oscar and Ozpin is getting harder and harder as time goes on due to the nature of the merge, so I just left him out. If I absolutely had to commit to a ranking, I'd stick them in the EX tier and be done with it, but I admit that comes with problems, which is why I didn't do it.

Velvet is just straight-up impossible to rank because her combat effectiveness changes drastically based on what photographs she has available and thus what fighting styles she can effectively mimic, and I don't think we know a whole lot about her base capabilities, so I thought about her placement for about thirty seconds and then threw up my hands and gave up.

Anyway, this is my first big post on this website, so I hope the format is at least legible and hope that I didn't mess anything up this badly. Thanks for reading if you've stuck with it this long, and please feel free to dunk on my bad takes or just share your own if you want. I'm open to discussion, especially since I feel like a lot of these character placements were hard to pin down.

[megashadowdragon]

jaune will end up amping cinder to get rid of the grimm arm freeing her

jaunes semblance allows him to amp all of the effects of aura including healing effect and we know that her grimm arm isnt protected by aura and when a external object like an organ from someone else is implanted into someones body there is a risk of organ rejection

( his amplification was powerful enough to amp weiss’s aura to the point she healed from cinders spear without any scarring ( and any internal organs that were damaged were completely healed ) ( when in the fight with knight when her aura wasnt able to heal from the wound on her eye which was much shallower)  and it still scarred)  

rhodes name may be a reference to the name of the earliest version of cinderella   Rhodopis

crowno-0 . tumblr . com/post/620188897794768896/just-looked-at-saphrons-wiki-and-oh-look-saphron#notes

…okay, so I was just looking at the story of Cinderella, and Wikipedia helpfully told me that the earliest known variation of the story is that of Rhodopis.

Rhodopis is a slave girl who was bathing on day, when an eagle swoops down and grabs her sandal. It travels to Memphis and drops the sandal in front of the King (not Elvis). Taking this as a sign, the King sends his men around the Kingdom to find the owner of the sandal, and when Rhodopis is brought to him, he married her.

This story was first recorded by the Greek geographer Strabo, somewhere between 7 BC and 24 AD.

However

Rhodopis is mentioned by an earlier writer.

In 440 BC, the historian Herodotus recorded the tale of Rhodopis, a courtesan from Thrace, owned as a slave by Iadmon of Samos (who also owned Aesop) during the 5th Century BC. He eventually took her to Egypt, where a man named Charaxus of Mytilene buys her freedom for her.

Charaxus of Mytilene is best known for being the brother of the famous poet, Sappho.

So the earliest version of Cinderella is freed from slavery by Sappho’s brother.

Food for thought.

Saphron and Terra Cotta  refer to the ancient Greek poetess Sappho of Lesbos, so famed for her romantic preference for women that the name of her homeland coined the term “lesbian”, and her own name coined the term “sapphic”. Many of her works that survived did so on terra cotta pottery shards

and jaune is saphrons brother and the grimm arm has been equated to the shock collar except the grimm arm won't be taken off so easily and jaune would be the one to free cinder from it  free her from salem 

 and given how jaune always put his hands on someone to amp their aura he will put his hand on cinders head when he amps cinders aura 

According to the Wiki:

“The Indecisive King draws various parallels to Jaune Arc and Cinder. The King and Cinder have nearly identical lines when reuniting with the Widow and Jaune, initially not remembering the grieving person but “starting to remember you” once the adventurer does something to affect them. Furthermore, Jaune and the Widow have parallels in having to grieve a lost loved one in over a year, and Cinder connects to the Crown of Choice through being the key to unlocking it in the Beacon Vault, as well as her conflict views regarding choice and destiny. 

the indecisive king ended up being saved by the widow which supports the idea of jaune saving cinder

hoepunkausta . tumblr . com/post/620858326965731329/very-true-salem-is-a-widow-in-a-sense-but-also/embed

it also fits given that jaune is rubys foil

hawkeyedflame . tumblr . com/post/152581160728/on-rubys-elusive-character-development-or-why

“ jaune is a foil To Ruby. She’s a prodigy who quickly became a deadly warrior at a young age and is welcomed into Beacon two years early as a result while Jaune is a hard worker who progresses slowly and had to lie his way into Beacon because of his nonexistent combat background. Ruby is a strategist specialized on pre-defined team attacks and wields a self-made weapon capable of long range combat. Jaune is a tactician specialized in creating new team attacks according to his analysis on the battlefield and wields a family heirloom only capable of close range combat. Ruby has a rather broken family but they fully support her decision to become a huntress while Jaune’s family is large and united but they don’t support his choices nor have any faith on him. Ruby is a tomboy who dominates the battlefield but doesn’t enjoy dancing whereas Jaune tends to act girly and is initially terrible at fighting but also a great dancer. The more you look into them as a pair, the more contrasts that can be spotted in the details.”

jaune has a more “feminine way of dealing with emotions” while ruby has the more masculine way of dealing with emotions

aminoapps . com/c/rwby/page/blog/why-its-good-for-jaunes-semblance-to-be-a-support-type/xpp7_XQ4s2u6RGX2zboa6JwM2XMekWGZd68

“Joan of Arc is known for breaking gender stereotypes about what it meant to be a woman. And if you think about it in a lot of ways Jaune doesn’t fit into the stereotypical “man box.” We are don’t “men don’t cry.” He wears his emotions on his sleeve. While in the real world men (and in the world of RWBY BOTH men and women ARGUABLY) are told to be strong. And that many people superficially equate physical strength with heroism (Raven?) it is fitting that Jaune’s semblance doesn’t so much doesn’t so much empower himself, as it empowers others. (as well as himself but its more effective on others in the team since they are more skilled than him) The so called “Feminine” strength.” P.S. Hmm as a follow-up to my The Importance Of Foils Part 2 post. I think that Ruby, despite being a girl, fits into the “man box” better than anyone else including it’s UNHEALTHY WAYS OF DEALING WITH EMOTIONS. The only difference is on remnant, it’s not because a man doesn’t cry. But because “a hero doesn’t cry.”

ruby first activated her silver eyes leading to her to learn about them when she saw pyrrha jaunes partner impaled by cinder and burnt to ash failing to save pyrrha  her awakening being in reaction to her death while jaune activated his semblance and realized what it was when he saw rubys partner weiss  impaled by cinder and  was able to save her  life awakening his semblance to do so allowing him to learn what his semblance was ( which is a good example this is an example of them being foils  and how its been shown and effected their storys )

rubys special ability that  she awakened due to cinder hurts cinder due to the grimm  salem put in her while jaunes special ability would end up saving cinder from the grimm part of her

@knightfallcravin​

[currantlee]

My issues with Blake’s Atlas outfit

Blake Belladonna is an ambush fighter who will avoid unnecessary combat and prefer to surprise or even backstab her opponents rather than picking an open fight. She is highly mobile, fast and can use the power of her Semblance, Shadow Clone, to make immobile copies of herself in order to distract or deceive her opponents. Her clones can be modified with dust to have different attributes, for example ice dust may be used in order to create a clone made of ice. Blake also excels at stealth and infiltrating enemy territory.

I’m focusing so much on her fighting style and her abilities because fights are an important part of RWBY. Let’s not forget that according to the fanbase, the fights speak for themselves!

However, so does character design. And if I were to show you this particular character design without you having watched the show – would you believe me that this is the same character I just described to you?

If you did,then you’re probably different than me and this character design actually makes sense to you – which isn’t a bad thing. However, it doesn’t make sense to me, not for a character like Blake and not for an environment like Solitas.

I have a love-hate relationship with RWBY. On the one hand I love the show because there are so many wonderful concepts and ideas in that show (even those seem to be borrowed from other media without an actual understanding on how the concept works most of the time). And on the other hand I hate it because it almost never uses the concepts and ideas to their full potential and prefers to do a lot of very bad fanservice instead.

That being said, I want to make very clear that everything in this post is my opinion and my perspective. I obviously dislike this character design, however, my opinion is not a universal one. If you like this design, that’s great!

Please do also keep in mind that I’m almost entirely self-taught when it comes to this topic and my primary approach when designing characters myself is practicality. This approach obviously doesn’t apply universally and it is certainly not the only way to approach designing a character.

My initial reaction to Blake’s new design

I’m not going to lie: my first reaction when I saw the V7 Artwork for Blake was: “What is this?” Not a purely negative way because there are actually elements I like, but still, the design didn’t make sense to me from the get-go, which isn’t a good thing in my opinion.

To the design’s credit, I did recognize Blake (mainly due to knowing it’s from RWBY and her cat ears) and not just because someone told me that it’s Blake. I obviously had a lot of problems with this design immediately after the reveal despite this.

Also, and I’m just going to mention this really quickly: when a few friends and I discussed the new designs shortly after the reveal, we all could agree somewhat that this design seems to be a somewhat fetishized version of Blake, despite the fact that she isn’t showing much skin. This is especially unfortunate because Blake is essentially a catgirl. You know, that type of character design which commonly tends to be fetishized. I won’t go into further detail with this however as the topic makes me personally uncomfortable.

With that right out of the way, let’s get into the actual analysis.

The Character of Blake Belladonna

To understand why I think that this character design is very mediocre at best in my opinion, I think that I should explain who I think Blake Belladonna is as a character – and not just her fighting style, which I have already described in the opening.

To be honest... It’s hard for me to characterize her. And not because she doesn’t do or talk much, but because RWBY is incredibly inconsistent with characterization, specifically when it comes to Blake (seriously, I think only RWBY can have an anti-violence character murder somebody and then jump back to the character being against violence... Without any development in between). So, I’m just going back to the Black Trailer and the first episodes of RWBY Volume 1 in order to get an idea of what she was originally like.

The first time we see Blake is in the Black Trailer, in which she ambushes a train together with a mysterious guy (a.k.a. Adam Taurus), only to leave him behind on the train at the end of the trailer after this vocal exchange:

Blake: What about the crew members [of the train]? Adam: What about them?

This established Blake as a character who, despite the violent nature of her actions, cares about others and their lives. It also shrouded her in mystery: we wanted to know why she left that guy behind. We also get a glimpse on Blake’s sass in the trailer when she tells Adam to “[not] be so dramatic”.

The first time we see Blake in the show itself is in RWBY Volume 1, Chapter 2: The Shining Beacon (Part 1), where she confronts Weiss Schnee after Ruby Rose accidentally knocked over her baggage. Note that in this scene, Blake is fairly sassy, just like she was in the Black Trailer:

Ruby: Hey, I said I was sorry, princess! Blake: It’s “heiress”, actually. Weiss Schnee, heiress to the Schnee Dust Company, one of the largest producers of energy compellants in the world. Weiss: Finally! Some Recognition! Blake: The same company infamous for it’s controversial labour forces and questionable business partners.

Let me say this again: Blake is – once again – being sassy here. And the reason I want to stress this so much is because Blake is often described as shy or anti-social because she prefers to be alone, which I don’t really agree with – my approach is that she is more of an introvert, who only interacts when she wants to (which fits her cat theme very well in my opinion), something that is established within that scene.

Aside from that, the scene establishes that Blake is usually well-informed and has a strong sense of justice, which is a very important part of her character as well. She is also not afraid to speak out against injustice when she sees it.

Finally, we have the scene that is most often used in order to describe Blake as an introvert: the scene in RWBY Volume 1 Chapter 3: The Shining Beacon (Part 2), in which Ruby thanks her for coming to her help when Weiss was scolding her earlier on and the two start to have a conversation about books. Blake is established as a book lover and more of a quiet and calm person in this scene.

It should be mentioned that the scene is used to contrast Blake with the other members of the main cast: Ruby is too shy to talk to Blake at first (which is something you can’t say about Blake, because she doesn’t seem uncomfortable with the situation, but more like she doesn’t want to talk and continue reading), Yang’s flashy personality contrasts Blake’s calmness and Weiss’ egoism contrasts Blake’s display of maturity.

We later learn why Blake prefers to be alone: over the course of the first four volumes, we learn that Adam was in fact Blake’s boyfriend and that they were members of an organization that turned into terrorists (after Blake left) together. Blake ran away because she did not want to hurt people and enrolled at Beacon Academy to become a Huntress instead in order make up for the bad things she supposedly did during her time with the White Fang (again, Blake has a strong sense of justice). After Blake’s friend Sun Wukong is injured by Ilia Amitola at the end of Volume 4, the two have an emotional conversation in Chapter 11: Taking Control:

Blake: This is why I left them all behind. Sun: What are you... Wait. Where am I? Blake: I am done seeing my friends hurt because of me!

She becomes very emotional in this scene, to the point where she seemingly doesn’t care that Sun is hurt, which is something you rarely see happening with Blake. This emphasizes how important her friends’ safety is to her. Also, if you think about it, Blake’s worries aren’t empty fears. She was part of a terrorist organization – and they’ll likely not let her go just like that. In fact, the White Fang tries to assassinate her entire family in Volume 5. So yeah, her worries are far from unjustified.

It should also be mentioned that Blake alludes to Belle from Beauty and the Beast, specifically the Disney version.

All in all, Blake is a character, who...

... (deeply) cares about others and their lives, even when those people are her enemies. This holds true especially for her friends.

... has a strong sense of justice.

... usually displays a calm and mature demanor.

... often approaches things very rationally and will only become very emotional in rare instances.

... usually chooses to be alone / not interact with others unless she wants to.

In addition, when it comes to fighting, Blake is a character who...

... generally avoids violence and especially open fights when she can (even though she is capable of handling an open fight as long as she is with at least one teammate).

... is intelligent, usually well-informed and capable to use this to her advantage.

... is not a heavy hitter and instead relies on her speed and mobility, especially in the air.

... can be quite stealthy and deceptive.

... is capable of using multiple weapon types and dual-wielding blades.

This, to me, makes clear that Blake was likely supposed to be a ninja / assassin type of character with elements of an illusionist (mainly due to her Semblance). This would mean that she relies on the element of surprise, creativity when it comes to taking her opponent down (which she needs to do fast or she will lose the fight) and escaping, staying hidden for extended periods of time, and finally: information.

So now that we know who Blake actually is (or rather, what she was likely supposed to be), we can talk about...

So what about her Atlas design?

General Stuff

Where am I supposed to look? Someone please tell me where I am supposed to look here because I don’t know!

There is way too much stuff without any kind of orientation going on with this design, which is a general issue with the newer RWBY designs in my opinion. However, the Mistral designs did at least have some sort of focal point, something that immediately caught the eye of the viewer.

I struggle with this a lot myself, but usually you want to have a focal point in any picture - including a character design – and ideally guide the viewer’s gaze from there. In character design, the focal point is often a character’s hair or face, because as the characters may change their outfits over the course of a series, they can’t change their face (and usually won’t change their hair too much). In other words: focal points in character designs are often the elements that make a character recognizable.

An example of this is Tsukino Usagi a.k.a. Sailor Moon with her iconic bunnytails (it are buns. Falling into pigtails. Bunnytails! Which is fitting because her name means moon bunny). Not only do they immediately draw your attention because it is a very unusual hairstyle, but the loose part also guides your view from her face to her actual outfit. It’s also an iconic element that remains mostly unchanged throughout her various different character designs over the course of the series.

Blake’s visual signifier, the thing that makes her identifiable immediately and distinguishes her from other characters looking similar to her (e.g. Cinder Fall) is the fact that she always has something on her head. In the early Volumes this used to be a bow, in the newer Volumes it’s her cat ears. However, those do not function as a focal point in this design (or honestly – at all). Which by itself is not an inheritly bad thing (even though Blake’s design admittedly doesn’t stand out much due to the lack of a distinct, outstanding element that makes her instantly recognizable and the fact that there are so many characters with a similar design to hers).

The problem with this is that there is no other focal point. As I stated previously, there is just too much going on in the design. The cat ears are about the last thing I’m looking at, and my gaze is not lingering on them for a while. This is partly because they’re just not a very intriguing element and partly because there is too much other, potentially more interesting.

Another thing about this is Gambol Shroud. Now, I will say this, I have issues with the reforged Gambol Shroud. However, incorporating the original Gambol Shroud into the artwork rather than the reforged version (even if it had been reforged in a different way than just adding yellow superglue) was a good choice on Ein Lee’s part – and just not because it avoided giving spoilers to the audience. The cat ears are just not enough to identify Blake immediately (just going by the design), especially because they’re already rather subtle in a design that isn’t as overloaded as this one and there were so many things that were changed about her character design for Atlas, mainly her hair.

Gambol Shroud takes up more space than the ears, and especially the ribbon is interesting, so the viewer’s gaze is more likely to linger on that for a while. That’s why I think that this was a really good choice.

That being said, let’s talk about Blake’s other visual signifiers, which are...

Blake’s hair and the color black

A big part of RWBY’s design philosophy is that every character has their design, name and even traits centered around one color. In case of Blake, her color is black, meaning that it should ideally be the most present color in her outfits.

Blake’s hair is also black and speaking of it... Many shows are afraid to change the characters hairstyles. Not only is hair something that’s really personal (in real life too! Which is why hairstyle changes, especially drastic ones like cuts, are often interpreted as indicators of a huge change in someone’s personality or life), but hairstyles, especially in anime, manga or similar media, can become really iconic. Just think of Son Goku’s spiky tower or, again, Sailor Moon’s bunnytails.

I will say though that Blake’s hair, before the change, was admittedly fairly simple, if not even boring, and too similar to Yang’s hair in my opinion. That is why I really welcome this change to be honest. However, I wish they would have kept Blake’s curls because I actually really liked those, and I think an updo would have been cooler than a bob.

Another minor nitpick I have is that the bob makes her look slightly younger in my opinion, which is a common problem with short hair as it tends to emphasize the face. This is why if someone has a fairly round face, short hair can make them look younger. This especialy applies to anime as most figures tend to have round faces. However, I also want to mention that due to Blake’s unique, cat-like eye shape, this problem is not as prominent as it would be with other characters (like Yang).

Then again, Blake just went through an life-changing event (she murdered her former abuser and yes, I’m acknowledging it despite the fact that I really didn’t like the entire storyline, it felt like such a waste to me). So a haircut is definitely not out of place.

Back to black though...

This design doesn’t exactly lack the color, but it doesn’t bring it out that well either. The mostly white coat (which is ironically my favorite piece in this design) takes up much space in the design. It’s just... White is generally not considered a heavy color, but I’d say in this case it is. It is too heavy for a design with a primary color that is dark.

And with that, I’m jumping to...

The Penguin Coat 

I already said that the coat is my favorite piece in this design... Also, yes, I call it a penguin coat because it reminds me on cute little penguins for some reason... So props to the coat for reminding me on cute little penguins I guess. May I mention that this actually fits with the fact that the main characters are in a rather cold climate in RWBY Volume 7? You know, since most penguin species live in cold climates... But let’s move on from the penguins.

The flaps are likely a callback to Blake’s original design, which had those funny flaps that reminded a bit of classic illusionist outfits - it also reminds me personally on some of Zatanna’s outfits (from DC Comics). And guess what, this actually makes a lot of sense considering that Blake’s Semblance is essentially creating illusions (of herself).

Coats are also often used to make characters look more mysterious. The first use of this was in one of Akira Kurosawa’s movies, which are considered some of the most influental of all time and you should definitely go watch some of these because they’re awesome. Two other popular franchises using long coats for mysterious characters are The Matrix (with Switch wearing a white coat like Blake does) and Kingdom Hearts. So it is fitting for a character like Blake.

I know a lot of people do not like Blake wearing white coats. However, I disagree. First of all, Blake has ties with the White Fang (yes, the story arc was dropped but just because it was it doesn’t mean it never existed) and second of all, they are in a snowy area. Meaning that the coat has the same color as the environment. So it makes sense, at least it does to me.

A detail I really, really love is the black patch on the back of the coat, specifically because it creates the illusion that Blake is moving differently than she actually does. While this makes things a bit harder for the viewer indeed, it fits Blake’s theme of an illusionist / ninja crossover really, really well.

All of this being said, it should not be left unmentioned that logically spoken a coat like this restricts your mobility. Especially the flaps are constantly going to be in the way. Which is why I think that the flaps could honestly have been shorter (which would possibly have taken away the “long coat” element though). I think there isn’t really a “better” or “worse” here, so this is a very minor nitpick.

All of this being said, giving Blake a coat is not a bad idea to be honest. It protects her from the cold, it is commonly used to add some element of mystery to a character’s design and the flaps are not only a callback to Blake’s original outfit, but also a clever nod to her illusion powers.

That being said... Let’s move on to the two longest and silmoutanously most annoying sections of this post. Yes, we’re finally moving on to the worst, yet most interesting, elements about this design!

The Belts

First of all, the collar belt is absolutely unnecessary and no, we didn’t need a reference to Yang’s tryhard Mistral outfit here, at least in my opinion.

The backpack belts aren’t bothering me to be honest. They don’t feel disrupting and even though they obviously don’t have a function as well (because no, this is not how you tighten backpack straps), they add some nice detail to the straps and most of all: they are part of an element of this outfit, not a standalone element.

Let’s move on to the hip belt. That is actually a belt a really like, because it holds those pouches while fulfilling a decorative function at the same time. The belt hangs loose on Blake’s hips, which looks good (especially with Blake’s hourglass-shaped body) and contrasts the rest of her more skin-tight outfit. I also really like the idea of Blake having some sort of Batbelt (you know, the equipment belts the Bat Family usually wears in the DC comics), especially because she is a ninja / illusionist. Both usually have a lot of equipment (compared to other fighters / performers) in real life. My only nitpick would be that the belt hanging loosely on her hips could get in the way during fighting - but then again, it also looks really cool, so 9/10.

But now, let’s finally address my biggest belt issue in this design: the wristbelts.

I just don’t see a (reasonable) function with these – in fact, they are the most impractical thing about this design in my opinion – and they don’t even look cool. They just... I think they look weird, uncomfortable and just really out of place.

Some could argue that they have protection purposes. However, I am going to debunk that quickly because in fact, wearing something like that is actually very dangerous in combat. You see, belts usually have a buckle, right? Same with Blake’s wristbelts. Belt buckles are hard – if somebody hits the buckle in battle, her wrist could easily break from that

And yes, I know there is aura. However, aura can’t fix the fact that the belts are so broad that they limit Blake’s ability to move her wrists – which is important for someone who fights with swords and swings around with a ribbon a lot.

I also want to add that character designs should ideally work without the viewer knowing about in-universe logic (like aura). Simply because our brain is automatically, whether we know in-universe logic or not, going to assume that the logic applying to the design is the same logic that applies to our everyday life. Therefore, any element that doesn’t make at least some sense with real-world logic applied will feel weird, even if the viewer starts thinking about a justification with in-universe logic (which they have to do actively, while the real-worl logic assumption happens unconsciously and automatically).

It should also be mentioned that wristbelts as a concept per se aren’t automatically bad – there are instances in which they can work. Now, before I get into this, something needs to be brought up again: the CRWBY (meaning the people behind RWBY) borrows a lot of concepts from anime and video games, JRPGs in particular. However, they usually do so without understanding what makes those concepts work in the original. There is a great video by hbomberguy on YouTube that explains this in detail (I recommend the section Anime Homework in particular if you don’t want to watch a 2-hour-long video essay).

With the new character designs for RWBY Volume 7, a lot of people (including myself) have noticed that the concepts the show seems to be borrowing this time are concepts that are often found in Tetsuya Nomura’s character designs, particularly the Kingdom Hearts ones. Heck, a lot of people have pointed out that Nora Valkyrie’s new dress reminds them on Kairi’s dress from Kingdom Hearts II and Jaune got nicknamed Jauntus / Jaunxas for his new haircut (which reminded several people on Ventus and Roxas from the Kingdom Hearts franchise).

Saying that Nomura’s character designs might have inspired RWBY’s character designs isn’t a far stretch either: the new designs for the four main girls were designed by Ein Lee, who was known for her Kingdom Hearts fanart back in the day, before she started working on RWBY. So we know that she definitely knows this series and has, to some extent, analyzed the character designs - because she has drawn these characters herself. And even though blogpost by Kerry Shawcross about the redesign process confirms that Ein Lee wasn’t the only one in charge with those character designs, she was still the one who did the main bulk of work when it came to the new designs of the four main girls.

Let me clarify this: I don’t think that it’s an inheritly bad thing to take inspiration from something. Heck, Kingdom Hearts itself takes a lot of inspiration from other media! So the plain borrowing of concepts is not the problem here in my opinion. The problem is that the CRWBY obviously don’t understand what makes the concepts they’re borrowing work in the original.

Whenever you take inspiration from something, especially when borrowing concepts – like the concept of wristbelts in this example – , you should always, always make sure to understand those concepts and what makes them work at least to some extent. And while I believe that it is not possible to understand a concept or an idea to 100% – except for the person who originally came up with it – it is possible to get a good enough understanding to make the same concept work in another place. Does it have to work in the exact same way? No, and it likely won’t because if you re-use an existing concept, you’ll likely add your own ideas to it. That’s the interesting thing about inspiration (and also any kind of fanwork by the way).

So yeah, taking inspiration isn’t forbidden, even when it is so obvious where you got it from that the entire FNDM starts joking about Tetsuya Nomura having invaded RT (which... Quite honestly, I find that joke funny). However, when taking inspiration, you should also be aware that if two things are very similar, whether that’s intended or not, people are going to compare, whether you like it or not.

That being said – let’s compare, shall we?

So, here we have the character design of Sora (for those of you who don’t know Kingdom Hearts, he is the protagonist of the series and fights with a sword-like weapon, similar do how Blake does) from Kingdom Hearts III, and next to it, a 3D render of Blake in her Atlas character design from RWBY Volume 8. I picked a 3D render because I feel like it is fairer and Volume 8 gave us updated models for pretty much every single character (which was absolutely necessary because nobody looked good in Volume 7). I mean... They fixed Blake’s terrible hair halfway through Volume 7, which is something they usually don’t do, because so many people rightfully complained about it. Anyways...

Now, I don’t know what you think, but I have to say that with Sora’s wristbelts many of the problems with Blake’s wristbelts do not exist or are not as prominent. One of them is that in this case, the belts do not lack a function: I can immediately see what they’re for.

Sora wears those rather loose bracers in KH3 (which make sense since he fights with what is essentially a sword). The bracers are loose because Sora is rather scrawny and the bracers make him appear a little broader than he actually is. This is important for silhouette purposes since without the bracers, Sora’s silhouette would look fairly similar to the silhouette of another character in the same game – not absolutely undistinguishable, but this still makes it a bit easier to differentiate between the two characters.

Back to the wristbelts though: without these, the bracers would eventually fall off or constantly be in the wrong place. It should also be mentioned that Sora’s wristbelts are not even half as wide as Blake’s are, meaning that they don’t restrict the movement of his wrists as much as Blake’s do.

On top of all this functional stuff, they add a nice spot of yellow to the bracers, which not only does make the bracers look more interesting, but serves two purposes:

Designwise: the only other place where you have yellow are Sora’s shoes. If it weren’t for the wristbelts, the addition of the color would seem very random – and if there wasn’t any yellow, the design would look way more boring. However, there is another reason for the yellow.

Gameplay: Kingdom Hearts III is an Action RPG and Sora is the protagonist. Meaning that he is the playable character for most of the game. Since it’s an Action RPG, it involves fighting, which can be really chaotic. That’s where the yellow comes into play: you need to know the position of Sora’s hands and feet in order to have precise control. Yellow is a signal color (meaning that it is very bright) and the yellow Sora wears is also very saturated, meaning that it is unlikely that it appears anywhere else in a frame (even though it’s Kingdom Hearts and thus really colorful).

And yes, Blake’s wristbelts could indeed have a similar function. However, I personally feel that it doesn’t work since black is her primary color, meaning your eye is not immediately drawn to her wrists (even though the belts are a contrast against the white of Blake’s coat). Black also isn’t a signal color, so if that is what they were going for, they should have gone for an electric purple, a bright red or yellow instead.

For fairness’ sake, here is a nitpick about Sora’s wristbelts as well: the placement of the belt buckles. Because the way they are placed, the are an additional risk for injury. While replacing the wristbelt with velcro would certainly be the best option in regards to safety here, I also acknowledge that a wristbelt simply looks a bit better. That being said, to minimize the risk of injury, the buckle should be placed on the inside of the arm, next to the palm. That’s the spot where it is the least likely to get hit and cause (or worsen) an injury.

Blake’s wristbelts have the same dangerous buckle placement (which doesn’t make this any better) and are, as I have already said, pretty much non-functional. They’re unnecessary, obstructing and the only reason why they are there is because someone thought it would look cool (which... No, it doesn’t, it just looks weird).

And before someone says something about Blake’s wristbelts holding the sleeves of her coat together when the sleeve zippers are opened: why are the sleeve zippers even open? They’re at Atlas. It’s supposed to be freezingly cold! Why does she have her sleeve zippers open? It makes absolutely no sense!

The Zippers

Speaking of the zippers: why are there so many zippers in the first place?

Again, most of those zippers are not functional. Somewhat of an exception is the long zipper on Blake’s coat, which... Ein Lee herself has admitted that she shouldn’t have designed it to go all the way down because the coat is not meant to be zipped all the way down (Ein Lee, seriously... What were you thinking designing this?). So it’s basically only half-functional.

What is worst about this is that the one zipper that should be there – a front zipper for the catsuit – is not there. In other words: Ein Lee should have swapped the long coat zipper for a longer chest zipper on the catsuit. Yes, there might be a back zipper hidden underneath the coat for Blake to get out of the catsuit. But imagine the pain of opening a back zipper every time you want to pee. Which I can tell you is a pain, even if you’re more flexible than me. Therefore, a chest zipper would be way more practical (and there are ways to prevent it from accidentally zipping open, so that shouldn’t be a problem.

The rest clearly don’t serve the purpose of getting in and out of the catsuit or coat. The only purpose they could theoretically serve is ventilation.

Let me stress this: Atlas and Mantle are located on Solitas, a continent that is essentially the North Pole. It is really cold (according to Weiss in RWBY Volume 7 Chapter 3: Ace Operatives the cold of Solitas can kill you in a matter of hours without protection or aura). Even with moving around a lot, ventilation is not needed, especially not with outfits like these. I mean... They don’t look very warm to be honest. If there were thick jackets, fur and just more stuff that implies that these clothes are easy to overheat in, then yes, we could discuss about ventilation zippers. But like this? No. At least not with me.

And I’m not going to discuss aura now because of the stuff about real-world logic I already explained in the section about the belts. Also, quite frankly, aura as a concept is a mess of its own and another thing the writers can’t seem to keep consitant, but: if aura can protect you from extreme cold, shouldn’t it be able to protect you from overheating as well? Shouldn’t you rather wear warm clothing because if you run out of aura, you’re going to freeze if you don’t? It won’t hurt you because as long as your aura is up, you’re not going to overheat.

So yeah. Even with in-universe logic applied, there is no point why there should be so many zippers. The risk of overheating is technically nonexistent, so you can’t use “they’re fighting all the time, they could overheat if their clothing is too warm” as an argument.

That leaves the option that the zippers are meant to be a decorative element. Now, I will say that this can work - however, it doesn’t work in this case for multiple reasons.

First of all, if they are purely decorative, then why are the sleeve zippers open all the way? That implies a function, which, as I have established, is nonexistent because no ventilation is needed with and without in-universe logic applied. That leaves the sleeve zippers to be unnecessary because they fulfill neither a decorative nor a functional function within the character design.

Secondly, the zippers, especially the leg zippers, are obstructing Blake’s movements – again. Yeah, we already had this with the wristbelts. Logically spoken, a skin-tight catsuit like Blake is wearing needs to have a lot of stretch in order for the wearer to move properly, especially in the leg area. However, a zipper doesn’t have stretch, it’s static. And because it has to be sewn into the fabric, it also affects the fabric’s stretch. If you want to see how, I suggest taking your favorite pair of ideally skinny jeans (since those usually have some stretch) and trying to stretch the fabric around the zipper area. And keep in mind that those denim fabrics only have a fraction of the stretch that a catsuit usually has!

Third, and this kinda goes in line with the first reason, the zippers are not visually misappropriated. This might be a bit of a weird one to understand, so let me show you two designs in which decorative zippers are used, one being yet another character design by Tetsuya Nomura and the other being Blake’s original character design.

In both designs, the decorative zippers are visually misappropriated. What I mean by this is that while the zippers are there and might even work in the intended way (opening and closing a piece of clothing), they are placed in a way that makes it very clear that the zipper is not intended to function in the way zippers usually function.

In case of the left design (which is Kairi’s design in KH2) that means the decorative zippers are placed upside down. Now, that doesn’t mean that they are completely unfunctional (meaning that they might be unzippable). However, zippers are usually placed the other way around, except for sleeve zippers – which makes our brain assume that the zippers might not function in the way zippers usually do.

In Blake’s original design, visual misappropriation is handled a bit differently: the sliders aren’t visible (they’re covered up by the flaps of her vest), which also makes out brain assume that the zippers might not work. Again, there is no way to ensure that they truly don’t, but our brain will assume it.

What makes the lack of visual misappropriation worse in the case of Blake’s V7 outfit is that there are unzipped zippers (the ones on the sleeves) which look exactly the same as the other zippers. This implies to our brain that yes, all the zippers are functional.

Now, this is also the case with the KH2 design of Kairi. However, due to that tiny detail that is the visual misappropriation of turning the decorative zippers upside down, our brain will not assume that the decorative zippers are functional. In fact, it’s the other way around: due to the one non-upside down zipper being slightly opened (implying to our brain that it is functional), it contrasts the fully zipped... I can’t say up, so zipped down decorative zippers. And this is actually a great example on how much impact such tiny details can have.

Last but not least, the leg zippers are visually disruptive. Not only because absolutely no one would place zippers on catsuit legs like that, but also because they draw your eyes somewhere your eyes are not meant to be drawn to (which is an overall problem with the V7 designs to be honest).

Now, someone pointed out on a podcast that the zippers help follow the movement of Blake’s legs. But let me ask one question about that (that was also thrown in in the podcast by the way): why does it have to be a zipper then? It could be a simple seam! Or the next thing I’m going to discuss, which are...

The Kneepads

Not going to lie, many people including myself seemed to be really confused about those because from the artwork alone it wasn’t clear whether Blake is wearing boots or kneepads. Fortunately we know from the Concept Art that those are meant to be kneepads now.

That makes my main question about those kneepads: why are they black? Seriously, why are those kneepads black?! And why are they the exact same shade (because yes guys, there are actually shades and tones of black as well) as the catsuit? I really don’t understand why they did this, because usually Ein Lee and the RT designers seem to have more of a tendency to never put the same color next to each other when they create a divide in a character design. So just... Why didn’t you do it there?

As I said, the kneepads could also serve as as visual indicator for Blake’s leg movement - without disrupting the entire design. As I said, by “different color” I mean a different tone of black (maybe a bit brighter than the catsuit is), they don’t have to be signal red, white or yellow. Yes, that joke was intended.

And that marks my transition to the final thing that bothered me about Blake’s new look. I already said I’m going to talk about it earlier, so now let’s finally get an answer to the question:

What’s the deal with Gambol Shroud?

First of all, I have to praise Blake’s backpack. I didn’t want to put this into a separate section because I literally have nothing else to say than “I love it because I think it fits the thought that Blake, being a ninja / illusionist needs lots of equipment and I LOVE the fact that it doubles as a way for her to carry Gambol Shroud around!”

That being said, my happiness about how Gambol Shroud is being handled in Volume 7 ends exactly there.

As you remember (or you don’t if you didn’t watch RWBY Volume 6 Chapter 12: Seeing Red), Gambol Shroud was cut in two pieces by Adam. When this happened, a large portion of the FNDM including myself were incredibly exited for Gambol Shroud’s upgrade. In fact, my exitement for the upgrade even overshadowed my distaste for this particular scene which I am not going to include because there is a lot of blood involved.

Summary of what happened: CRWBY deliberately had an anti-violence character murder someone who was unarmed, portrayed it as a heroic action and then never talked about it again despite the fact that this event should have traumatized both of the characters that were involved into this. Which... I just want to say that even though Adam allegedly abused Blake, which was never officially confirmed by the way, it is not okay. Murdering Adam out of self-defense? Sure, that would have been an interesting new arc for both Blake and Yang. However, this wasn’t self-defense and as I stated before, it was never talked about again, so there goes the story potential. But anyways...

The exitement for the upgrade in relation to this scene overshadowed my disdain for it for a very particular reason: I believed that it might be foreshadowing to Blake wielding not only one but two dagger-like weapons in the future.

Unfortunately, this turned out to be false and all we got instead was this:

Yes... They simply fixed the blade with yellow superglue... Which is not only incredibly uncreative and lazy in my opinion, but it’s also highly unrealistic: the blade is bade of metal. Once it is broken, even a fix with superglue won’t make it last long before it breaks again.

I think that turning Gambol Shroud into two daggers, maybe connected by the ribbon, would have been a better route to go. And if you still wanted that catana (because this joke is fun), you could always design it in a way that Blake can connect those daggers to get a full katana again. It would also allow for her to still use the catmerang and the pistol as well as the ribbon and the sheath.

I also think that Blake wielding daggers rather than a full katana would contribute to her ninja image. It’s way easier to sneak a knife or a dagger into some place than it is to smuggle a sword in there. Which is why historical assassins nearly exclusively used dagger variations – including the historical ninjas or shinobi.

Finally, it would have given Blake the chance to evolve her fighting style. At this point, Blake has fallen far behind with what she can do in comparison with her teammates and this is partly because the CRWBY seems to be mostly clueless about what to do with her, leading to Blake swinging around in combat most of the time. A whole new weapon type could be a fresh start for creativity with Blake. And yes, this is me talking in good faith because we all know that RT wants to save money and that is a huge part of the reason why every character’s moveset, including Blake’s, has become so incredibly boring.

Conclusion

Dear RoosterTeeth! Please fire the person with an unhealthy obsession with way too many belts and zippers in character designs before the FNDM makes even more jokes about Tetsuya Nomura having invaded your company. They were funny in the beginning, but they’re getting old. Thank you!

And now for the real conclusion...

Blake’s new design has a lot of problems, but almost all of them come from the same source: a lack of understanding for what makes the concepts the design uses work. This goes from concepts borrowed from other media (belts and zippers) to the concept of Blake as a character overall.

Furthermore, parts of the design (especially Gambol Shroud) show a lack of creativity and an overall lazyness. I mean, why put thought into how to avoid a void (ha, the pun!) in your character design or use a creative way to fill said void when you can just add a useless accessoiry?

Let’s get concrete. Here is what should be fixed in my opinion in order to make this a better character design:

Less zippers! The leg zippers and sleeve zippers can easily go completely. The front zipper of the catsuit should be longer than it currently is. And if you really want additional jacket zippers, then make them so it are clearly pocket or ventilation zippers (meaning that they don’t go all the way down to the hem – also, don’t have skin showing underneath if that is the case).

No wristbelts! For the reason I stated above. The other belts can stay, even though I am admittedly not much of a fan of the collar belt. I’d also say to tighten the hip belt a bit because the way it hangs loosely on her hips right now, it’s going to be a nuisance at best.

Make it look warmer! With fluffy parts or just anything that doesn’t look like plain, thin fabric. They’re at the north pole and I don’t care about aura, a character design has to make sense without knowing in-universe logic.

No heels! Yes, not even wedges. They are a nightmare to walk long distances in, let alone fight. Even the show itself acknowledged this in Volume 2, so time to apply this knowledge – after eight seasons of having characters who do a lot of acrobatic stuff run around in heels.

Give Blake gloves! It’s cold and quite honestly? I love to give infiltrator / ninja / spy characters gloves. Simply because you don’t want to leave fingerprints anywhere, do you? So gloves would be a win-win.

Do something different with Gambol Shroud! I don’t care what it is – dual daggers would honestly be cool, but who knows, someone else might have an even better idea than that! I’m open to anything, as long as it’s something different, and not just the superglue solution we got in canon.

Those are the major issues in my opinion. Fixing them wouldn’t exactly make this my favorite character design ever – honestly, if I was the character designer for RWBY, I’d do the entire outfit completely different. But I’m not and I’m not going to design an alternative because honestly? I’d rather save the ideas I have for alternative Blake outfits for OCs or characters from other media that I actually care about. As I stated before, I have a love-hate relationship with RWBY and I’m not particularly fond of the way things are being handled in the show as of late (*cough* the fact that they absolutely had to show Oscar being tortured *cough* That’s not dark, that’s just tasteless in my opinion, especially when so much other important stuff gets ignored for something like this).

Anyways, if the issues above were fixed, then the design would at least make sense to me and I think I could even say I like it – because all in all, this is a bad design in my opinion. The issue is just that while this design comes with some good ideas any concepts, it doesn’t execute them very well (which is the issue with RWBY a lot of the time).

Anyways, that was my mustard on the topic. I apologize for any language mistakes since this posting wasn’t beta’d and English is not my first language. Thank you so much for reading, especially if you got through this entire thing.

[cavendishtogopls]

WhiteRose Quick Ship Analysis based on RWBY Anthology (Red like Roses) [Spoiler Warning!]

As we all know Red like Roses is about Ruby and from what I heard, all of the girls have one for themselves so what baffled me is Weiss' heavy involvement with Ruby's story arc. And when I say heavy, I meant they didn't just make Weiss a major character in some of the stories, they went so far as making a story in Weiss' POV and how she sees Ruby. The Red like Roses manga is like a whiterose Bible for shipping fuel.

Before I get to the heavy stuff I would like to point out the differences I see between Ruby and Weiss in the show and in the manga and okay maybe I'd like to throw one for fanfiction as well.

So, in the series I felt like Ruby had little character development, little in terms when you compare her to the three other girls. I mean Blake's character arc is almost done. Family conflict? Done. The White Fang? Changed for the better. Adam? Dead in a ditch. And look she got a cute blonde girlfriend to show for it. Yang basically went through so much herself and I can just feel that Volume 7 is a Weiss centered one since they're in Atlas. Ruby however felt like a stationary character and that's not always a bad thing. I'm saying this because Ruby felt like a character the evokes change, be the cause of it rather than changing herself. She pushes people to be better, she pushes herself to be better, she's this force that people naturally gravitates to because rather than her changing, she's the change you need in your life. You can see it mostly with Weiss, but also to her immediate environment like when she was with team RJNR.

That said, in the manga, she has so much more character depth that I kinda wish I would see on the series. Usually you can see Ruby as this childish impulsive character and using Blake's words "the embodiment of purity herself" but here you can see how she does understand the consequences and dangers of her dream. She's not naive, she knows the stakes. She just doesn't let those fears get in the way of the need she has for protecting people. In the manga, Weiss has the more black and white character, she's either really proud of Ruby or irritated at her. In a way that makes it seems like she's there for the sole purpose of reacting with Ruby's character and Ruby's the one pulling all the punches.

Now in fanfiction, you do not see this kind of Weiss. And if I do, it's very rare. It's a known tendency for writers to have a character in the ship that stays true to their nature and one a more flexible character they can do anything with just for the heck of it. Come on, Weiss is a real life princess with a cool scar and the emotional trauma to go with it. It's like she's asking writers to mess her up more or fix her. As I said, Ruby is a kind of character that evokes change in people whether it's Weiss realizing she's gay or Ruby being the push she needed to finally stand up to Jacques. Now, we move to the ship analysis part.

Case A: Ruby's Diary

This is the one story in Weiss' POV. Weiss wanted to see Ruby grow up because she was convinced that would make Ruby take her job as leader more seriously. As much as Weiss wanted to protect the innocence in Ruby, she knows that it would be better for Ruby to recognize the world as it is and not some hero story or fairytale. In the end, Weiss realized that being optimistic doesn't make Ruby a bad leader. For Weiss, Ruby is Ruby and to Weiss, Ruby is a great leader, teammate and friend and Weiss could only hope to be strong enough to protect her.

Case B: Princess in shining combat skirt

Scenario being Mercury dancing with Ruby and making her uncomfortable so Weiss stepped in and stole Ruby from him. I for one would like to see this as jealous protective girlfriend Weiss but that's not really clarified. Now you can all argue that Ruby was perfectly capable of defending herself—she wields a scythe and Mercury would find himself toe to toe with a furious Yang had Weiss not done anything. Ruby is socially awkward and everyone who knows her, knows that. So, Weiss watching over Ruby and swooping in to save the day, in the middle of a dance btw which is largely considered as rude and inappropriate, speaks volumes on how much Weiss cares for her partner. And the fact that Ruby calls her a knight in shining armor shows she appreciated the gesture.

Case C: Flirty Ruby

I did not expect this chapter at all. Ruby does not show any kind of interest in romance in the series so her looking for a boyfriend kind of blindsided me. Weiss was so against the idea that Ruby jokes around that Weiss likes her. Weiss honey why are you blushing so much if this isn't true.

Case D: Sister, Friend, Wife

Ruby why tf would you say that and finally thank you for noticing the ever present blush on your partner. Stop making her blush she's going to melt oh God.

Case E: Angry Ruby

I have only seen Ruby angry a couple of times the entire series and this one was equivalent to her anger at the battle in Haven when Weiss was fatally wounded and she had no idea what happened. Weiss was her partner and Ruby very literally watched Pyrrha die. Ruby was angry because had it not been for Jaune's semblance, she could have easily lost Weiss too and she would have failed not only in protecting her best friend and partner but also as a leader. This scenario was with less grave consequences but with the same motif of Ruby protecting Weiss. Ruby was the youngest of team RWBY but she seems very adamant in protecting her friends, not thinking about consequences and in turn gave more depth to her character instead of just showing emotions when one of her friends die. Tbh I don't think Ruby is over her mom's death which I would give anything to see Ruby talking about it with Qrow or Yang or Tai or anyone really. Again, Weiss is used here as a catalyst for Ruby's behavior.

Case F: I rest my case

This looks really really gay. There's really little to no heterosexual explanation for this. Like let's say if I was bold enough to carry the Red like Roses manga anywhere and leave it open at these exact pages, any uncultured bystander with no knowledge on RWBY would think this is a typical coming of age Yuri manga.