#shonen anime just usually handles it SO poorly because its usually like. all she's got ...or if she has issues they get kinda...erased late

[bbq-potato-chip]

honestly i really gotta respect gotouge for not really going into romance. like yeah we know the main guys have love interests but its not really that big a deal because the focus is on the friendships and the whole siblings thing . which honestly??? respect. its actually quite refreshing. hell yeah best friends and siblings

[rwbyconversations]

Why I think some people don’t like Jaune

Jaune Arc. Jauney boy. You make very hard to like you sometimes. 

Jaune Arc is almost certainly the most discussed character in RWBY, even more so than the titular four girls. This is not a very good thing. Since the early days of Volume 1, Jaune has been derided and mocked by portions of the community, often dismissed as a poorly planned out audience surrogate, a writer-insert and/or Miles shoving in a cliche shonen protagonist into Monty’s tapestry of art. That last one is hyperbole, for the record. But regardless, Jaune is far from unanimously loved by the fandom- just go see how many RWDE posts are about him. I tried reading some of them and after I finished washing my eyes out with bleach, I found myself mildly disagreeing with their contents. 

(sidenote if anyone ever convinces Dudeblade to learn how to use italics, bold or underline to emphasize something instead of random capitalization like Baby’s First Word Doc I will actually pay you in pesos)

But while the reasons people give for hating Jaune are many, some of them have little basis in reality. Others, meanwhile, are quite painfully true and have incredibly valid criticisms that can be applied to RWBY as a whole at the core of their message. So today, I’d like to explain why I think some people hate Jaune, why some of the reasons don’t hold much weight, and why a few are quite valid.

Reason 1) “Jaune’s a Self/Author Insert!” 

Perhaps the most common and damning criticism of Jaune, especially in the earlier volumes, were claims that Jaune was just an insert character for Miles to fawn over. Miles and Kerry have themselves said that Miles has had very little to do with writing Jaune in the show proper since Volume 1, and that most of Jaune’s larger scenes were done at the behest of Kerry or Monty. Quote:

In the first few Volumes, if Jaune was in a scene it was almost always because either Monty or myself wanted him in a scene. From the very beginning, Monty was very big on having that archetype of character be fairly prominent in the show. Miles has always been incredibly hesitant to insert Jaune into scenes, to the point where he's voiced before that he wishes sometimes that he didn't voice him.

That said, this only came out in early 2018 after Volume 5 had already wrapped. In the years before then, many a fan was utterly convinced that Miles was behind most of Jaune’s more limelight-hogging scenes in Volume 1 particularly. This wasn’t helped by some quotes of Miles that got taken out of context, primarily that he based Jaune off himself as a younger teenager (the quote is in fact referring to Jaune’s voice).

Fandom also plays a purpose in Jaune gaining the inglorious title of self-insert. Jaune’s lack of a semblance, conventional attractiveness, age that put him close to the girls and vague backstory meant it was very easy for fanfiction writers to appropriate Jaune into whatever they needed, which at best included harem comedies and at worst...

Well, hell on earth. Fandom has had a large impact on RWBY, and I believe the “self-insert” accusations regarding Jaune are perhaps the most clear example of this. Some people do still believe to this day that Jaune is an SI, but I am willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the writing team and assume that no, any intent was not maliciously planted and it was an accident.

Reason 2) Jaune’s an audience surrogate

This one actually has basis in reality since the crew have actually said Jaune’s purpose in the early volumes was to be the audience surrogate (see above, second bolded part). To explain the term the audience surrogate is a character, usually found in fantasy or science fiction stories, who is new to the setting and its more complex rules. Thus, when someone tells this character how the system works, it doesn’t feel weird for the audience to have this information. We learn with the character, drawing us further into the setting. On the surface, an audience surrogate is not a bad storytelling device, but what it comes down to is execution, and here is where I feel that RWBY falls flat on its face in handling Jaune.

Jaune’s primary purpose in the first half of Volume 1 is largely to serve as the vehicle through which we discover Aura. Aura, the resource incredibly common in-setting and able to be tracked to an exact percentile in tournaments. In fact, Aura is so easily tracked, Remnant’s smartphones can track other people’s Auras no sweat. Most audience surrogates usually only need lore explained to them when it’s a rare facet of life, hence why it’s often seen in fantasies with magic to get the reader caught up on the rules. 

For example, in the Mistborn series, while Vin is aware of burning metal, she unlocks her Mistborn powers at the beginning of the trilogy and then has to learn about the other metals she didn’t know she possessed, and gets further training on the one metal (brass) she could burn that she thought was just her luck. As well, Vin infiltrates high society, so alongside learning about the different metals, we also use Vin’s inexperience to learn how high society works under the Lord Ruler.

For Jaune to have no clue about Aura, despite the commonality of it in-setting, is almost unthinkable and essentially requires his parents to have locked him in a basement for his entire life. While surrogates aren’t meant to know everything about a setting, it is expected that they at least know the basics- again, see Vin from Mistborn as an example of this.  Therefore, I will not deny that Jaune is an audience surrogate. However, I do believe that Jaune is a bad audience surrogate who breaks the internal rules of a character alongside the logical rules of the setting.

Reason 3) Jaune’s a cliche shonen lead

Let me rattle off a quick idea for a story, like I’m giving an elevator pitch.

Our story is about a young boy (usually with spiky hair) who goes to join a magical academy so he can slay monsters. He’s not proficient in the art of combat but he has a big heart and genuinely tries most of the time, so through outside circumstances he manages to enroll in the school. Immediately, he gets pegged by the headmaster for special reasons and develops a crush with an cold-hearted young woman who rebukes his advances. All the while, he develops a close friendship with a shy girl who is holding a candle for him but he doesn’t see her desires until it’s too late. In the meantime, he continues to train to prove himself a great hero.

Now, who did I describe. Jaune Arc? Or half of the shonen genre? There’s a reason for the popularity in the stock shonen hero cliche- it’s pretty easy to get right on the first try, makes for a mostly likable hero who the audience can get behind and root for as they aspire to become a Pokemon master collect the Dragonballs win the Battle City Finals become the greatest hero who ever lived. Jaune hits a lot of the cliches of the Stock Shonen Hero in early RWBY, and this set off alarm bells in the minds of many of RWBY’s more anime-conscious fans. The moment Jaune fell for Weiss and she shot him down, the early fanbase were on-edge about Jaune. RWBY had been advertised as four girls fighting monsters and kicking ass with great choreography. And here comes this blonde wannabe in a hoody trying to insert a love triangle into all of that? Yeah, no thanks. Again, this was likely something Monty intentionally pushed through since the AMA says Monty was big on Jaune’s archetype being in the show.

Though Jaune, in my opinion at least, did step away from these trappings later in RWBY, becoming more sullen and less focused on traditional shonen ideals, the early days played no small role in defining why people loathed Jaune in early RWBY. And once the label of “shonen lead” was plastered onto Jaune, it would prove nearly impossible to remove. 

In all honesty, this is one of the smaller reasons for people’s dislike of Jaune, but notable in that it set the groundwork- people already dismissed him as a cheap shonen lead, and that principle latched onto Jaune like gum onto a shoe. 

Reason 4) Jaune’s stealing scenes and where it hurts characters

Though Jaune has had a significantly reduced presence in RWBY since Volume 1, it seems that his primary scenes in Volumes 4 and 5 had a very unintended consequence of taking away from other characters. One of the often-cited scenes of this is Volume 4 Chapter 10, Kuroyuri.

The scene is set for Ruby to finally confront the trauma bubbling beneath the surface that had been eating at her since Volume 3- Penny and Pyrrha’s joint deaths and the Fall of Beacon, her Silver Eyes and how no one was willing to talk to her about them. And yet who does most of the speaking in this scene? Jaune. Jaune indirectly hijacks the scene away from Ruby so that instead it can become a scene of, quite frankly, platitudes that ring hollow. Despite supposedly being a scene where Ruby is being built up, despite supposedly being about Ruby,  and how inspiring she is, the active character in the scene, the one with agency and prevalent on-screen characterization... Is Jaune.

Volume 5 Chapter 11 is the other standout example of this, in what is now an infamous string of events. Jaune basically hijacks not one, not two, but three active character arcs- he again strips Ruby of her agency by going after Cinder, who also has her sub-plot of hating Ruby curtly kicked out a window because of Jaune hogging her attention, and then Weiss takes a frankly insulting dive so that Cinder has someone to spear so we have a cheap cliffhanger so dramatic tension can die onscreen so Jaune can have an excuse to pop his Semblance’s virginity. And let me stress, Ruby has about as much agency as some belly-button fluff for the rest of the Battle of Haven and by extension the entire Volume.

This is a reasoning for disliking Jaune that I fully understand and can get behind. Through a mix of tragic circumstance (the Volume 5 scene is effectively the one time Jaune takes relevance in the entire volume) and some mind-boggling creative choices, Jaune now twice in a row stripped Ruby of agency she has desperately needed, interrupted a two-year in the making subplot with Cinder, and indirectly killed RWBY’s dramatic stakes. Did you really think they’d kill Weiss in Volume 5? Exactly, no one really thought they’d go through on it, Weiss and the rest of RWBY are basically safe until the last two or three volumes. Regardless of whether or not Jaune is meant to be seen as a main character or a side, his focus scenes have the tragic mishap of constantly coming at the expense of someone else being undermined.  

Reason 5) He’s... not actually that good a strategist.

Jaune is a crap fighter, he’ll readily admit to being much weaker in direct combat than anyone else in the heroes side. So instead, he adopted the sub-trope of shonen leads, the strategist/quick thinker. Be it Izuku in My Hero Academia or many of the protagonists in JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, shonen has a long history of heroes who fight as much with their minds as they do with their fists.

Here’s the problem with that. Jaune’s really bad at being a strategist. In fact, despite not even doing it since Volume 3, Ruby has displayed far more tactical acumen than Jaune.

JNPR vs BRNZ isn’t won through tactical skill beyond just throwing Nora at the problem after Divine Cindervention (compare this with how effortless RWBY make taking down ABRN look). Jaune even rips off Ruby’s idea of code-names but his attempt fails due to insufficient practice. Meanwhile Ruby says “Checkmate” in Volume 5 and despite not having trained together for months, Blake and Weiss immediately jump into action.   

Jaune explicitly quotes one of RNJR having said "you're the strategist", and is the character that gets to come up with a plan for taking down the Petra Gigas. And even though the way his plan is phrased initially gets played as humorous, his dumb strategy ultimately gets vindicated by actually working.

“Keep moving, run in a circle” is pretty poor advice (in fact, Ren had already been trying this strategy when Jaune said it and the Nuck still landed a blow on him), but in-universe it’s treated like gospel. Nobody points out how weak Jaune’s strategies are because from a meta perspective, the only way Jaune is able to stay relevant in fights in Volume 4 is to shout inane “strategies.” The issue with this is that (yet again) it comes at the expense of other characters, including (again) Ruby, who in Volumes 1 through 3 was shown as far sharper when it came to using her team and their strengths. Everyone else on the hero side has to take an intellectual dive so Jaune can take home a glorified participation trophy. 

Jaune using his greatsword for a stabbing attack when it’s built for slashing in the Haven battle. I brought this up in my “What went wrong at Haven?” post, but I thought it was worth repeating that this is a massive blunder.

Reason 6) General misc stuff

I couldn’t make full points of these, so I made bullet points for some of the smaller reasons Jaune is disliked

The Weiss obsession. There’s no real nice way of sugarcoating Jaune’s actions in Volume 2, no means no. That this came about from some glorified improv and the idea that it would be a funny idea makes my stomach churn. 

The bully arc taking so much time. Thanks to how Volume 1 cut some episodes, Jaune’s arc with Cardin took four weeks in real life to complete. This only exaggerated the issues people took with Jaune, and had RWBY not immediately come back with the fight-scene Renaissance piece that was Blake and Sun vs Roman, I can’t imagine how many people would have dropped the show thanks to an after-school special that got wedged in their fighting anime.

Jaune looking away and letting Cinder shoot Amber. Ignoring that Cinder’s Semblance can let her shoot around targets, which she does in the Pyrrha fight, Jaune never stood a chance against Cinder, and no matter what, most friends would be distracted by their friend’s agonized screams and would likely turn around in despair.

Jaune hating Qrow in Volume 4. Thanks to Jaune being the one member of RNJR willing to call out Qrow for his and Ozpin’s parts in Pyrrha’s death, Jaune got some flack from Qrow’s notable fandom. Ironically enough, people began to dislike Jaune more when he refused to ever act on these feelings after Ozpin’s return in Volume 5, with Jaune only ever calling out Ozpin after Yang did it with the Birds Reveal (I’ve written a piece before about why that reveal fell flat). His out of nowhere tepidness in approaching Ozpin regarding Pyrrha’s death was so out-of-nowhere that people were begging for Jaune to have screentime again, that’s how random it was.

To conclude, there are many reasons why people hate Jaune Arc, and the story doesn’t really help his case a lot of the time in all honesty. While some of the stated reasons are far from logical (I at least hope I’ve explained why I think he’s not a self-insert), Jaune unfortunately fails to set himself as a distinct character without it usually biting someone else in the ass. He fails to be a proper audience surrogate due to lacking essential knowledge about the setting. He has an unfortunate tendency to overshadow other characters and hijack their plots for his own scenes (poor Ruby), and he fails to even be that competent a strategist, leaving his supposed skills to be more of an informed attribute. Add in a variety of smaller reasons for his hatedom, legitimate or not, that have stacked up over the years, and Jaune unfortunately has several valid reasons to dislike him. While I still personally like the Noodle Boy, and I do hope that he can develop and grow stronger as a fighter, tactician and character in the coming future, I cannot deny that I fully understand why people would be turned off by Jaune. So much could have been done with Jaune, but much like a bad salad that comes before a great main course, you’ve already lost your appetite before the main servings arrive.

To surmise, Jaune-hate began because of a perfect storm of circumstances that would be impossible to make happen on purpose. He could have recovered from the flirting with Weiss, the Audience Surrogate/Shonen lead status, or being the main character in several drawn-out arcs, but all at once? Was too much for any one character to bear, and Jaune was unfortunately the character who had all of this lumped on him within a year of the show beginning.

Thank you for reading.

... damnit kid why do you make it so hard to like you sometimes I don’t like doing this

[gunnerpalace]

Have you seen the vid 'Shonen Anime's Biggest Problem' by Reality Punch Studios? Bleach is briefly mentioned in it and the guy basically says that Kubo did a great job with the plot and characters during the Soul Society arc, but then later failed with all the other arcs after it. Thoughts?

I haven’t, but that’s pretty accurate. This is long, but fuck it, I want people to see it.

Karakura I: Great! Minor flaws, e.g., Ichigo leaving Rukia to fight Shrieker while he escorted Karin, rather than having the clearly less-than-combat effective Rukia do so, and learn about Ichigo; not covering a whole month of their time together (including Ichigo’s birthday); ultimately dispensing with Tatsuki’s importance to the plot; could have probably stood to be about twice as long to show more of Ichigo and Rukia’s early relationship and flesh out relations with the nakama more. 

Soul Society: Great! No real flaws until the end, e.g., you just killed off Central 46 and had a great upheaval in the power structure of the to-date main antagonists; this was the perfect time to have some exposition on them (e.g., who the other two Great Noble Houses are, what their role in Central 46/Soul Society is aside from being strong, etc.); good pacing, dramatic, memorable and contained fights, even for supporting characters (e.g., Uryuu vs. Mayuri, Renji vs. Byakuya).

Karakura II/Arrancar: Not so great! So, Ichigo’s just spent his summer break, what, moping over “the Hollow?” Why does everything in this series revolve around no one (Kisuke, Isshin, Juushirou, Yamamoto, etc.) telling Ichigo what the fuck is going on and just solving the problem? One of the only times I can remember an authority figure just saying “We’re here to do X because Y,” is Toushirou in this arc, so good for him? The fights against the Arrancar are when Bleach started to go bad with F I G H T S  N O B O D Y  C A R E S  A B O U T  ™ because they don’t involve the protagonists. Grimmjow was an effectively introduced villain even though he’s really just Kenpachi + Zangetsu (”Shirosaki”). The moments with him, Ichigo, and Rukia were good. The Visored were neat but were ultimately a waste. Most damningly of all, Orihime didn’t learn a goddamn thing from going to an alternate dimension and watching Ichigo almost die over and over to save Rukia.

Hueco Mundo/Fake Karakura+: Really bad! When FNCA became a real problem. Just all kinds of shit that didn’t matter and wasn’t satisfying. The entire premise of them being there was stupid, as was the entire structure of the war. Aizen’s grand scheme turned out to be a bunch of bullshit. Overall just a terrible inversion of the Soul Society arc featuring a bunch of poorly-realized villains that were way overhyped. (Also, the final demonstration of the worthlessness of the Visored!) Our protagonists had to be rescued for the plot to continue on stupidly. (This can work, e.g. Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, but this isn’t the way to do it.) An unsatisfying conclusion that explained nothing about why what happened, had.

Lost Substitute Shinigami: Garbage. Okay, this arc has some great character-building for Ichigo and Rukia, and Xcution have memorable designs. I like Riruka. Ginjou, Giriko, and Tsukishima are really hateable villains. I like Ikumi. But. But. Fullbring is dumb and makes no sense, or needed to be introduced much earlier. The story of the substitute Shinigami is dumb and doesn’t fit well with what we know. The contrivances necessary to make Bleach work like a horror manga are ridiculous and just make the adults around Ichigo (e.g., Isshin, Ryuuken, Kisuke, Yoruichi, Shinji, et al.) look like fucking negligent assholes at the same time as Ikumi is telling Ichigo to trust adults. Also, the way the time skip was handled was that it wasn’t. It literally never gets addressed outside of about a dozen panels. It speaks to my heart but it wasn’t well-executed (hah!) at all.

Thousand-Year Blood War: Total shitshow where everything is on fire. The Sternritter were awful and utterly lacking in interest. (They’re all amoral psychopathic murderers, whoo!) FNCA go on forever, nobody does anything of importance, Ichigo and Rukia barely appear for large sections of it, and nothing sensible or satisfying happens except for an explanation of Ichigo’s powers that, while making a kind of sense, still doesn’t really explain anything. Don’t get me started on the ending, that requires War and Peace to fully deconstruct with how it doesn’t fit any of what came before.

If Kubo was just going to stop the manga, he should’ve stopped it after Soul Society arc. He couldn’t, because Aizen was still on the run, but if Aizen had been taken out there, it would’ve been okay. Open-ended, maybe an epilogue panel or page of Rukia putting on civilian clothes to see Ichigo again. Cool.

If he was going to stop after the Aizen saga, he should’ve done that. Again, an open ending. You could maybe have an epilogue of Ichigo thinking he sees Rukia out of the corner of his eyes over time. Whatever.

But no, this guy had a plan. Bleach is kinda like The X-Files, in that there’s a bunch of episodes, and then an overarching plot arc, except instead of being episodic, it’s archic; a bunch of small arcs under a larger one. The larger arc is that Soul Society, and existence itself, is fucked up. The smaller arcs are about what passes for “mundane” or “the usual” within this fucked up existence.

That alone probably answers your question, but I’m me, so I’m going to continue on to talk about what I want to talk about.

WHAT THE FUCK WAS BLEACH ACTUALLY ABOUT?

Let me explain my theory of what Bleach was supposed to be about, before Kubo got bogged down in thinking he was Tolkien II Turbo DBZ edition and got his series cancelled with his fuckery.

There’s this interesting video about how, in The Matrix, Neo isn’t “the One,” but rather, Smith is.

The Architect tells Neo that he’s the sixth “Anomaly” which resets the Matrix. Their arrival is expected and anticipated. Smith, unwittingly “created” by Neo, is what causes this particular iteration of the Matrix to end very differently than the previous five.

Okay, what the fuck does this have to do with Bleach?

Check it out: Ichigo (and Rukia) is (are) the One. That is to say: they’re Smith. The planned outcomes, the “Anomalies,” were Aizen and Yhwach.

They would go about their plans, get up to the Royal Realm, and then be summarily murdered by Zero Division and turned into the new Soul King, as a Soul King only lasts a certain amount of time and needs periodic replacement. (Check how old and busted the current one is.) This is why Zero Division gave zero fucks about whatever happened down below: it not only didn’t matter to their outcomes, it was necessary. (Kind of like Soul Society requires suffering to work properly.)

There’s evidence of this in Sajin and his grandfather. Their existence is never explained, but Clifford the Big Red Dog says “The world’s ‘bearer’ will simply change. We won’t change. No matter who holds the world. All we can do is lay low.” This is strikingly similar to The Merovingian and his motley crew of exiled programs from previous iterations of the Matrix: they are remnants of a bygone age, after successive resets.

What resets Soul Society (or possibly reality) is swapping Soul Kings.

Now what fucks everything up and makes this time different is the existence of Ichigo and Rukia. Ichigo is directly created by the fuckery of Aizen and Yhwach, much like Agent Smith was turned into Smith. The existence of Yhwach’s descendants, plus Aizen’s machinations, produces an unplanned-for feature. Something new. He’s easy to explain.

But Ichigo isn’t alone. He would’ve never gotten anywhere without Rukia. And Rukia is harder to explain.

Now Aizen says “The ‘true’ power of the Hougyoku is to read the minds of those around it and make manifest of what it finds there. […] You don’t understand? I’m saying that all of the ‘miracles’ that have occurred surrounding Kurosaki Ichigo, Kuchiki Rukia, and Urahara Kisuke thus far were manifested by the Hougyoku’s will.“ He goes on to say "And then I, armed with a hypothesis about the Hougyoku’s abilities, sent Kuchiki Rukia in the direction of Kurosaki Ichigo. Of course, there are limits to its abilities. The Hougyoku manifests what’s in the minds of those around it. But this will not happen unless the subject inherently possesses the power to fulfill their desire. By that token, this could also be called the ‘power that guides people toward their desires.’ … But living creatures are strange, they are made in such a way that they can actualize only what their minuscule minds wish for.”

First, notice how utterly fucking pissed Isshin is. Nothing else makes him remotely this upset. Nothing to do with Grand Fisher or Yhwach makes him even fractionally this agitated.

Now, stop and think for a moment. Does what Aizen said actually make sense? The Hougyoku does what those around it want, but it can only do so through what they are capable of. He also says that the Hougyoku has begun to understand his will… only just prior to explaining all this. Why does Aizen think he was previously outside of the Hougyoku’s influence?

Kisuke’s incomplete Hougyoku was hanging out in Rukia for a long time; presumably, out of anyone, it understood her will best. Aizen sent Rukia to Ichigo? No. Rukia wanted to go to Ichigo, and Aizen was the means to facilitate that, which coincidentally accorded with his desires too. Aizen is confusing cause and effect here through his own hubris.

How did Rukia know of Ichigo? Well, you could say she was looking for someone like Kaien. But there are inevitably many people like Kaien in the world and it could’ve guided her to any one of them. It took her to the only person who could do something about the world, which Rukia saw as fundamentally unjust. But how would the Hougyoku know about Ichigo? From reading Aizen’s mind? Maybe, but can it understand things like genealogy and ghost genetic engineering? It’s much simpler to say that it saw their connection.

I’m not going to relitigate all the material in Bleach which asserts that Ichigo and Rukia are connected and fated to meet one another, like the Sand and the Rotator chapters. But it’s out there, and the Hougyoku knew, so it put them together and warped everything around it to make that happen; to execute Rukia’s will, not Aizen’s.

My feeling is that Rukia and Ichigo form a single unit for the purposes of reality-disruption. They are the Pair, rather than Smith’s the One. Surprise, this is why Kisuke leaves it to them when he thinks he’s gonna die. He’s like the Oracle. Or something, this analogy is getting a bit loose.

Also, Ichigo’s whole thing is power, and Rukia’s whole thing is control. You might say they’re like a power source and a regulator. Water and a water wheel. Sand and a rotator.

So, much like Smith, they were going to change the outcome of their iteration in a way that couldn’t have been foreseen.

Then Kubo got his series cancelled because he spent too long drawing Doctor Juggalo fighting a giant hand, and Sword Hobo fighting Imagination Boy and Thor, so none of that happened.

tl;dr Kubo’s inability to stop himself from fucking with unimportant characters and unimportant plots, i.e., getting bogged down in the minutiae, is exactly what killed Bleach, along with trying to be too clever by half with things like Hueco Mundo as inverted Soul Society. Dude lost the plot and couldn’t see his own damn forest for the trees.