https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covid-propaganda/
A healthcare worker inoculates Encarnacion Tan Suan, 86, at a vaccination center in San Juan City, Metro Manila, amid the COVID-19 outbreak in the Philippines. Photo: REUTERS/Peter Blaza. Illustration: John Emerson
The U.S. military launched a clandestine program amid the COVID crisis to discredit China’s Sinovac inoculation – payback for Beijing’s efforts to blame Washington for the pandemic. One target: the Filipino public. Health experts say the gambit was indefensible and put innocent lives at risk.
By CHRIS BING and JOEL SCHECTMAN
Filed June 14, 2024, 9:45 a.m. GMT
WASHINGTON, DC
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. military launched a secret campaign to counter what it perceived as China’s growing influence in the Philippines, a nation hit especially hard by the deadly virus.
The clandestine operation has not been previously reported. It aimed to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other life-saving aid that was being supplied by China, a Reuters investigation found. Through phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos, the military’s propaganda efforts morphed into an anti-vax campaign. Social media posts decried the quality of face masks, test kits and the first vaccine that would become available in the Philippines – China’s Sinovac inoculation.
Translation from Tagalog
#ChinaIsTheVirus
Do you want that? COVID came from China and vaccines came from China
(Beneath the message is a picture of then-Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte saying: “China! Prioritize us first please. I’ll give you more islands, POGO and black sand.” POGO refers to Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators, online gambling companies that boomed during Duterte’s administration. Black sand refers to a type of mining.)
“COVID came from China and the VACCINE also came from China, don’t trust China!” one typical tweet from July 2020 read in Tagalog. The words were next to a photo of a syringe beside a Chinese flag and a soaring chart of infections. Another post read: “From China – PPE, Face Mask, Vaccine: FAKE. But the Coronavirus is real.”
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After Reuters asked X about the accounts, the social media company removed the profiles, determining they were part of a coordinated bot campaign based on activity patterns and internal data.
The U.S. military’s anti-vax effort began in the spring of 2020 and expanded beyond Southeast Asia before it was terminated in mid-2021, Reuters determined. Tailoring the propaganda campaign to local audiences across Central Asia and the Middle East, the Pentagon used a combination of fake social media accounts on multiple platforms to spread fear of China’s vaccines among Muslims at a time when the virus was killing tens of thousands of people each day. A key part of the strategy: amplify the disputed contention that, because vaccines sometimes contain pork gelatin, China’s shots could be considered forbidden under Islamic law.
The military program started under former President Donald Trump and continued months into Joe Biden’s presidency, Reuters found – even after alarmed social media executives warned the new administration that the Pentagon had been trafficking in COVID misinformation. The Biden White House issued an edict in spring 2021 banning the anti-vax effort, which also disparaged vaccines produced by other rivals, and the Pentagon initiated an internal review, Reuters found.
“I don’t think it’s defensible. I’m extremely dismayed, disappointed and disillusioned to hear that the U.S. government would do that.”
The U.S. military is prohibited from targeting Americans with propaganda, and Reuters found no evidence the Pentagon’s influence operation did so.
Spokespeople for Trump and Biden did not respond to requests for comment about the clandestine program.
A senior Defense Department official acknowledged the U.S. military engaged in secret propaganda to disparage China’s vaccine in the developing world, but the official declined to provide details.
A Pentagon spokeswoman said the U.S. military “uses a variety of platforms, including social media, to counter those malign influence attacks aimed at the U.S., allies, and partners.” She also noted that China had started a “disinformation campaign to falsely blame the United States for the spread of COVID-19.”
In an email, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that it has long maintained the U.S. government manipulates social media and spreads misinformation.
Manila’s embassy in Washington did not respond to Reuters inquiries, including whether it had been aware of the Pentagon operation. A spokesperson for the Philippines Department of Health, however, said the “findings by Reuters deserve to be investigated and heard by the appropriate authorities of the involved countries.” Some aide workers in the Philippines, when told of the U.S. military propaganda effort by Reuters, expressed outrage.
Briefed on the Pentagon’s secret anti-vax campaign by Reuters, some American public health experts also condemned the program, saying it put civilians in jeopardy for potential geopolitical gain. An operation meant to win hearts and minds endangered lives, they said.
“I don’t think it’s defensible,” said Daniel Lucey, an infectious disease specialist at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine. “I’m extremely dismayed, disappointed and disillusioned to hear that the U.S. government would do that,” said Lucey, a former military physician who assisted in the response to the 2001 anthrax attacks.
The effort to stoke fear about Chinese inoculations risked undermining overall public trust in government health initiatives, including U.S.-made vaccines that became available later, Lucey and others said. Although the Chinese vaccines were found to be less effective than the American-led shots by Pfizer and Moderna, all were approved by the World Health Organization. Sinovac did not respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Academic research published recently has shown that, when individuals develop skepticism toward a single vaccine, those doubts often lead to uncertainty about other inoculations. Lucey and other health experts say they saw such a scenario play out in Pakistan, where the Central Intelligence Agency used a fake hepatitis vaccination program in Abbottabad as cover to hunt for Osama bin Laden, the terrorist mastermind behind the attacks of September 11, 2001. Discovery of the ruse led to a backlash against an unrelated polio vaccination campaign, including attacks on healthcare workers, contributing to the reemergence of the deadly disease in the country.
“It should have been in our interest to get as much vaccine in people’s arms as possible,” said Greg Treverton, former chairman of the U.S. National Intelligence Council, which coordinates the analysis and strategy of Washington’s many spy agencies. What the Pentagon did, Treverton said, “crosses a line.”
‘We were desperate’
Together, the phony accounts used by the military had tens of thousands of followers during the program. Reuters could not determine how widely the anti-vax material and other Pentagon-planted disinformation was viewed, or to what extent the posts may have caused COVID deaths by dissuading people from getting vaccinated.
In the wake of the U.S. propaganda efforts, however, then-Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte had grown so dismayed by how few Filipinos were willing to be inoculated that he threatened to arrest people who refused vaccinations.
“You choose, vaccine or I will have you jailed,” a masked Duterte said in a televised address in June 2021. “There is a crisis in this country … I’m just exasperated by Filipinos not heeding the government.”
<MEDIA>@https://queso.prod.reuters.tv Then-Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte pleaded with citizens to get the COVID vaccine. “You choose, vaccine or I will have you jailed,” a masked Duterte said in this televised address in June 2021.
When he addressed the vaccination issue, the Philippines had among the worst inoculation rates in Southeast Asia. Only 2.1 million of its 114 million citizens were fully vaccinated – far short of the government’s target of 70 million. By the time Duterte spoke, COVID cases exceeded 1.3 million, and almost 24,000 Filipinos had died from the virus. The difficulty in vaccinating the population contributed to the worst death rate in the region.
A spokesperson for Duterte did not make the former president available for an interview.
Some Filipino healthcare professionals and former officials contacted by Reuters were shocked by the U.S. anti-vax effort, which they say exploited an already vulnerable citizenry. Public concerns about a Dengue fever vaccine, rolled out in the Philippines in 2016, had led to broad skepticism toward inoculations overall, said Lulu Bravo, executive director of the Philippine Foundation for Vaccination. The Pentagon campaign preyed on those fears.
“Why did you do it when people were dying? We were desperate,” said Dr. Nina Castillo-Carandang, a former adviser to the World Health Organization and Philippines government during the pandemic. “We don’t have our own vaccine capacity,” she noted, and the U.S. propaganda effort “contributed even more salt into the wound.”
The campaign also reinforced what one former health secretary called a longstanding suspicion of China, most recently because of aggressive behavior by Beijing in disputed areas of the South China Sea. Filipinos were unwilling to trust China’s Sinovac, which first became available in the country in March 2021, said Esperanza Cabral, who served as health secretary under President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. Cabral said she had been unaware of the U.S. military’s secret operation.
“I’m sure that there are lots of people who died from COVID who did not need to die from COVID,” she said.
To implement the anti-vax campaign, the Defense Department overrode strong objections from top U.S. diplomats in Southeast Asia at the time, Reuters found. Sources involved in its planning and execution say the Pentagon, which ran the program through the military’s psychological operations center in Tampa, Florida, disregarded the collateral impact that such propaganda may have on innocent Filipinos.
“We weren’t looking at this from a public health perspective,” said a senior military officer involved in the program. “We were looking at how we could drag China through the mud.”
A new disinformation war
In uncovering the secret U.S. military operation, Reuters interviewed more than two dozen current and former U.S officials, military contractors, social media analysts and academic researchers. Reporters also reviewed Facebook, X and Instagram posts, technical data and documents about a set of fake social media accounts used by the U.S. military. Some were active for more than five years.
Clandestine psychological operations are among the government’s most highly sensitive programs. Knowledge of their existence is limited to a small group of people within U.S. intelligence and military agencies. Such programs are treated with special caution because their exposure could damage foreign alliances or escalate conflict with rivals.
Over the last decade, some U.S. national security officials have pushed for a return to the kind of aggressive clandestine propaganda operations against rivals that the United States’ wielded during the Cold War. Following the 2016 U.S. presidential election, in which Russia used a combination of hacks and leaks to influence voters, the calls to fight back grew louder inside Washington.
In 2019, Trump authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to launch a clandestine campaign on Chinese social media aimed at turning public opinion in China against its government, Reuters reported in March. As part of that effort, a small group of operatives used bogus online identities to spread disparaging narratives about Xi Jinping’s government.
COVID-19 galvanized the drive to wage psychological operations against China. One former senior Pentagon leader described the pandemic as a “bolt of energy” that finally ignited the long delayed counteroffensive against China’s influence war.
The Pentagon’s anti-vax propaganda came in response to China’s own efforts to spread false information about the origins of COVID. The virus first emerged in China in late 2019. But in March 2020, Chinese government officials claimed without evidence that the virus may have been first brought to China by an American service member who participated in an international military sports competition in Wuhan the previous year. Chinese officials also suggested that the virus may have originated in a U.S. Army research facility at Fort Detrick, Maryland. There’s no evidence for that assertion.
Mirroring Beijing’s public statements, Chinese intelligence operatives set up networks of fake social media accounts to promote the Fort Detrick conspiracy, according to a U.S. Justice Department complaint.
China’s messaging got Washington’s attention. Trump subsequently coined the term “China virus” as a response to Beijing’s accusation that the U.S. military exported COVID to Wuhan.
“That was false. And rather than having an argument, I said, ‘I have to call it where it came from,’” Trump said in a March 2020 news conference. “It did come from China.”
China’s Foreign Ministry said in an email that it opposed “actions to politicize the origins question and stigmatize China.” The ministry had no comment about the Justice Department’s complaint.
Beijing didn’t limit its global influence efforts to propaganda. It announced an ambitious COVID assistance program, which included sending masks, ventilators and its own vaccines – still being tested at the time – to struggling countries. In May 2020, Xi announced that the vaccine China was developing would be made available as a “global public good,” and would ensure “vaccine accessibility and affordability in developing countries.” Sinovac was the primary vaccine available in the Philippines for about a year until U.S.-made vaccines became more widely available there in early 2022.
Washington’s plan, called Operation Warp Speed, was different. It favored inoculating Americans first, and it placed no restrictions on what pharmaceutical companies could charge developing countries for the remaining vaccines not used by the United States. The deal allowed the companies to “play hardball” with developing countries, forcing them to accept high prices, said Lawrence Gostin, a professor of medicine at Georgetown University who has worked with the World Health Organization.
The deal “sucked most of the supply out of the global market,” Gostin said. “The United States took a very determined America First approach.”
To Washington’s alarm, China’s offers of assistance were tilting the geopolitical playing field across the developing world, including in the Philippines, where the government faced upwards of 100,000 infections in the early months of the pandemic.
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The U.S. relationship with Manila had grown tense after the 2016 election of the bombastic Duterte. A staunch critic of the United States, he had threatened to cancel a key pact that allows the U.S. military to maintain legal jurisdiction over American troops stationed in the country.
Duterte said in a July 2020 speech he had made “a plea” to Xi that the Philippines be at the front of the line as China rolled out vaccines. He vowed in the same speech that the Philippines would no longer challenge Beijing’s aggressive expansion in the South China Sea, upending a key security understanding Manila had long held with Washington.
“China is claiming it. We are claiming it. China has the arms, we do not have it.” Duterte said. “So, it is simple as that.”
Days later, China’s foreign minister announced Beijing would grant Duterte’s plea for priority access to the vaccine, as part of a “new highlight in bilateral relations.”
China’s growing influence fueled efforts by U.S. military leaders to launch the secret propaganda operation Reuters uncovered.
Translation from Tagalog
Vaccine from China might be a rat killer. #ChinaIsTheVirus
Military trumped diplomats
U.S. military leaders feared that China’s COVID diplomacy and propaganda could draw other Southeast Asian countries, such as Cambodia and Malaysia, closer to Beijing, furthering its regional ambitions.
A senior U.S. military commander responsible for Southeast Asia, Special Operations Command Pacific General Jonathan Braga, pressed his bosses in Washington to fight back in the so-called information space, according to three former Pentagon officials.
The commander initially wanted to punch back at Beijing in Southeast Asia. The goal: to ensure the region understood the origin of COVID while promoting skepticism toward what were then still-untested vaccines offered by a country that they said had lied continually since the start of the pandemic.
A spokesperson for Special Operations Command declined to comment.
At least six senior State Department officials responsible for the region objected to this approach. A health crisis was the wrong time to instill fear or anger through a psychological operation, or psyop, they argued during Zoom calls with the Pentagon.
“We’re stooping lower than the Chinese and we should not be doing that,” said a former senior State Department official for the region who fought against the military operation.
Translation from Arabic
This is what the #United_States is offering to help countries, including Arab countries, obtain #Coronavirus (#Covid_19) vaccines and mitigate the secondary effects of the pandemic. Compare this with #Russia and #China using the pandemic excuse to expand their influence and profit even though the Russian vaccine is ineffective and the Chinese vaccine contains pork gelatin
“The relationship is hanging from a thread,” another former senior U.S. diplomat recounted. “Is this the moment you want to do a psyop in the Philippines? Is it worth the risk?”
In the past, such opposition from the State Department might have proved fatal to the program. Previously in peacetime, the Pentagon needed approval of embassy officials before conducting psychological operations in a country, often hamstringing commanders seeking to quickly respond to Beijing’s messaging, three former Pentagon officials told Reuters.
But in 2019, before COVID surfaced in full force, then-Secretary of Defense Mark Esper signed a secret order that later paved the way for the launch of the U.S. military propaganda campaign. The order elevated the Pentagon’s competition with China and Russia to the priority of active combat, enabling commanders to sidestep the State Department when conducting psyops against those adversaries. The Pentagon spending bill passed by Congress that year also explicitly authorized the military to conduct clandestine influence operations against other countries, even “outside of areas of active hostilities.”
Esper, through a spokesperson, declined to comment. A State Department spokesperson referred questions to the Pentagon.
U.S. propaganda machine
In spring 2020, special-ops commander Braga turned to a cadre of psychological-warfare soldiers and contractors in Tampa to counter Beijing’s COVID efforts. Colleagues say Braga was a longtime advocate of increasing the use of propaganda operations in global competition. In trailers and squat buildings at a facility on Tampa’s MacDill Air Force Base, U.S. military personnel and contractors would use anonymous accounts on X, Facebook and other social media to spread what became an anti-vax message. The facility remains the Pentagon’s clandestine propaganda factory.
Psychological warfare has played a role in U.S. military operations for more than a hundred years, although it has changed in style and substance over time. So-called psyopers were best known following World War II for their supporting role in combat missions across Vietnam, Korea and Kuwait, often dropping leaflets to confuse the enemy or encourage their surrender.
After the al Qaeda attacks of 2001, the United States was fighting a borderless, shadowy enemy, and the Pentagon began to wage a more ambitious kind of psychological combat previously associated only with the CIA. The Pentagon set up front news outlets, paid off prominent local figures, and sometimes funded television soap operas in order to turn local populations against militant groups or Iranian-backed militias, former national security officials told Reuters.
Translation from Russian
Can China be trusted if it tries to hide that its vaccine contains pork gelatin, and distributes it in Central Asia and other Muslim countries, where many people consider such a drug “haram”?
By 2010, the military began using social media tools, leveraging phony accounts to spread messages of sympathetic local voices – themselves often secretly paid by the United States government. As time passed, a growing web of military and intelligence contractors built online news websites to pump U.S.-approved narratives into foreign countries. Today, the military employs a sprawling ecosystem of social media influencers, front groups and covertly placed digital advertisements to influence overseas audiences, according to current and former military officials.
China’s efforts to gain geopolitical clout from the pandemic gave Braga justification to launch the propaganda campaign that Reuters uncovered, sources said.
Pork in the vaccine?
By summer 2020, the military’s propaganda campaign moved into new territory and darker messaging, ultimately drawing the attention of social media executives.
In regions beyond Southeast Asia, senior officers in the U.S. Central Command, which oversees military operations across the Middle East and Central Asia, launched their own version of the COVID psyop, three former military officials told Reuters.
Although the Chinese vaccines were still months from release, controversy roiled the Muslim world over whether the vaccines contained pork gelatin and could be considered “haram,” or forbidden under Islamic law. Sinovac has said that the vaccine was “manufactured free of porcine materials.” Many Islamic religious authorities maintained that even if the vaccines did contain pork gelatin, they were still permissible since the treatments were being used to save human life.
Translation from Russian
Muslim scientists from the Raza Academy in Mumbai reported that the Chinese coronavirus vaccine contains gelatin from pork and recommended against vaccination with the haram vaccine. China hides what exactly this drug is made of, which causes mistrust among Muslims.
“Can you trust China, which tries to hide that its vaccine contains pork gelatin and distributes it in Central Asia and other Muslim countries where many people consider such a drug haram?” read an April 2021 tweet sent from a military-controlled account identified by X.
The Pentagon also covertly spread its messages on Facebook and Instagram, alarming executives at parent company Meta who had long been tracking the military accounts, according to former military officials.
Translation from Tagalog
WE SHOULD NOT TRUST THOSE MED SUPPLIES BY CHINA REALLY. Everything is fake! Face mask, PPE, and test kits. There is a possibility that their vaccine is fake…
COVID came from China. What if their vaccines are dangerous??
It’s normal for Filipinos not to trust China, given the number of problems they gave us??
Facebook executives had first approached the Pentagon in the summer of 2020, warning the military that Facebook workers had easily identified the military’s phony accounts, according to three former U.S. officials and another person familiar with the matter. The government, Facebook argued, was violating Facebook’s policies by operating the bogus accounts and by spreading COVID misinformation.
The military argued that many of its fake accounts were being used for counterterrorism and asked Facebook not to take down the content, according to two people familiar with the exchange. The Pentagon pledged to stop spreading COVID-related propaganda, and some of the accounts continued to remain active on Facebook.
Translation from Russian
Turkmenistan residents report that the Chinese vaccine causes severe side effects. Those vaccinated with the Chinese drug experience severe nausea, vomiting and diarrhea. Some called ambulance services and ended up in intensive care.
Angered that military officials had ignored their warning, Facebook officials arranged a Zoom meeting with Biden’s new National Security Council shortly after the inauguration, Reuters learned. The discussion quickly became tense.
“It was terrible,” said a senior administration official describing the reaction after learning of the campaign’s pig-related posts. “I was shocked. The administration was pro-vaccine and our concern was this could affect vaccine hesitancy, especially in developing countries.”
By spring 2021, the National Security Council ordered the military to stop all anti-vaccine messaging. “We were told we needed to be pro-vaccine, pro all vaccines,” said a former senior military officer who helped oversee the program. Even so, Reuters found some anti-vax posts that continued through April and other deceptive COVID-related messaging that extended into that summer. Reuters could not determine why the campaign didn’t end immediately with the NSC’s order. In response to questions from Reuters, the NSC declined to comment.
The senior Defense Department official said that those complaints led to an internal review in late 2021, which uncovered the anti-vaccine operation. The probe also turned up other social and political messaging that was “many, many leagues away” from any acceptable military objective. The official would not elaborate.
The review intensified the following year, the official said, after a group of academic researchers at Stanford University flagged some of the same accounts as pro-Western bots in a public report. The high-level Pentagon review was first reported by the Washington Post. which also reported that the military used fake social media accounts to counter China’s message that COVID came from the United States. But the Post report did not reveal that the program evolved into the anti-vax propaganda campaign uncovered by Reuters.
The senior defense official said the Pentagon has rescinded parts of Esper’s 2019 order that allowed military commanders to bypass the approval of U.S. ambassadors when waging psychological operations. The rules now mandate that military commanders work closely with U.S. diplomats in the country where they seek to have an impact. The policy also restricts psychological operations aimed at “broad population messaging,” such as those used to promote vaccine hesitancy during COVID.
The Pentagon’s audit concluded that the military’s primary contractor handling the campaign, General Dynamics IT, had employed sloppy tradecraft, taking inadequate steps to hide the origin of the fake accounts, said a person with direct knowledge of the review. The review also found that military leaders didn’t maintain enough control over its psyop contractors, the person said.
A spokesperson for General Dynamics IT declined to comment.
Nevertheless, the Pentagon’s clandestine propaganda efforts are set to continue. In an unclassified strategy document last year, top Pentagon generals wrote that the U.S. military could undermine adversaries such as China and Russia using “disinformation spread across social media, false narratives disguised as news, and similar subversive activities [to] weaken societal trust by undermining the foundations of government.”
And in February, the contractor that worked on the anti-vax campaign – General Dynamics IT – won a $493 million contract. Its mission: to continue providing clandestine influence services for the military.
0 notes
A Necessary Post - Yang, Taiyang & Seeing Red
I debated this being a message or a note or a reblog, but ultimately this warranted an essay. Because a hatred of nuance is not even remotely the reason why Tai is critiqued as a teacher or father.
With that fact in mind, let's begin:
During RWBY Volume 4, Episode 9: Two Steps Forward, Two Steps Back Taiyang has a great deal of critical feedback for Yang regarding her fighting style, personality & Semblance.
The issue is that Tai's words and advice when compared to what we saw on screen before & afterwards demonstrate he does not understand how it works or how she used it.
So here for your reading pleasure if a more or less line by line breakdown of Tai's advice and why I don't feel it holds up & more to the point, why I don't believe Yang utilized it.
Taiyang: Do you realize that you used your Semblance to win every fight after the qualifiers?
Yang rightfully points out that her using Burn is no different than anyone else using their Semblances. I would add that Yang's Semblance only serves to enhance her already present abilities with damage taken in a fight. So her not using it would be stupidly holding back extra energy for no reason.
Tai's critique also fails to register that when using her Semblance to take out FNKI, Yang specifically disrupted the ground so Neon could not skate effectively & used the boost in power to turn Flynt's own weapon against him.
I will be addressing Mercury further down but she used it effectively and intellectually here and to great effect.
What's more, every other fights fighting style, weapons or both were literally built around their Semblances. Yang's threat level remains fairly consistent without her Semblance, all three of these other characters take a huge dip.
Taiyang: Because not everyone else's is basically a temper tantrum.
Ignoring that calling the manifestation of Yang's soul a temper tantrum is another in a long line if dickish things Tai says to Yang. Her Semblance literally does not work that way.
Her anger has jack and shit to do with it, this has been explained & demonstrated time and time again. Yang only gets a power boost when she's been injured, the fact she tends to be angry when using it is because being hurt sucks and she's usually in an intense fight. When the fight is going well and she still gets to use it she's not angry, as seen with a pleased smirk here:
So as before, Tai's critique is bereft of any merit, Yang's Semblance does not work that way.
Taiyang: I'm serious! Once you take damage, you can dish it back twice as hard, but that doesn't make you invincible!
Cite a time Yang thought she was invincible, cite it provably that Yang thought, said or indicated that she felt she was invincible. You can't because Yang never indicated as such this is something Tai is assuming about her at best.
& no her jumping in the Nevermore's mouth is not an example because she was not using her Semblance, did not take damage, it was a very effective strategy & seemingly either part of the plan, or was so easily understood that it could be safely and reliably worked into the plan. She wasn't using her Semblance here but finding evidence of risky behavior was hard, especially with her Semblance, go figure.
In fact every time Yang used her Semblance she did so only because someone landed a blow, which just happens in fights sometimes.
Taiyang: It's great when you're in a bind, but what happens if you miss? What happens if they're stronger? What then? Now you're just weak and tired!
We know what happens when Yang misses, she can swing again!
After the first blow on the Paladin she missed & needed help to catch it, her missing had zero impact on her Semblances.
As to what happens if they are stronger, um, she loses, that sometimes happens in fights. Its not something Yang can do anything about by holding back on extra strength. Not to quote Qrow but sometimes bad things happen. Other characters losing to stronger opponents don't get given this kind of diatribe's because its pointedly obvious that there was nothing to be done about it.
& on the final piece, she was very pointedly not weak and tired after using it. The only times she has been shown to be is when she was extremely low on Aura regardless in which cases not using her Semblance is a death sentence.
So again, we've established Tai's critique comes from nowhere & his understanding of her Semblance is nonexistent.
Taiyang: But you gotta keep your emotions in check. Keep a level head, and think before you act. Your Semblance is a great fallback, but you can't let yourself rely on it.
This is so painfully unfair it hurts.
No other character gets this kind of shit for expressing emotions in combat. In fact we see characters expressing emotions in battle all the time. Nor has she stopped displaying emotions in combat:
I already outlined how in all two of the Yang fights Tai actually witnessed she used strategy and retained excellent combat form. So again, baseless claims from Tai.
What's more, Yang primarily does use her Semblance as a fallback rather than rely on it in these fights. She only whipped it out against Mercury when he'd unleashed his seeming kill move on her and was confident he'd won.
Not using it here would be dumb and make no sense.
Yang doesn't rely on it to save her, she deploys it when it makes sense to & she has the energy or the need. This is more than we see from many characters.
Taiyang: It won't always save you. Obviously.
So now he is critiquing her for a fight he didn't even witness & knows jack shit about. So let's break this down once again:
Yang has spent the last 24 hours questions her sanity.
Yang's new home (Her words) is burning down.
Yang's sister is missing in all this chaos.
Then Yang's partner gets fucking stabbed, and the guy who did it is standing between them with a sword & gun, with fire all over Grimm all around.
Anything Yang can do he can counter, she tries to go around he only has to pivot. If she tries to fire from long range she might hit Blake. She tries an earth shock wave, she launches Blake into the fire.
She quite literally had no others options & zero time to try anything else because he can just shoot or stab Blake whenever he wants.
Taiyang: You definitely have your mom's stubbornness.
This, this right here is where all this is actually coming from. Tai is once again projecting Raven onto Yang despite them frankly having almost nothing in common.
With most of Yang's visible personality tells being inherited from Summer, such as the mother daughter shoulder check of V9. Thanks to chittychittyyangyang for the GIFs
Or as outlined in some songs with Yang's side of the lyrics explicitly citing how she is trying to fill the Summer shaped void in their lives.
Like the smell of a rose on a summer's day,
I will be there to take all your fears away.
Taiyang: Your mother was... a complicated woman. Like everybody, she had her faults, but those faults are what tore our team apart. And, it did a real number on our family.
Tai blames Raven for tearing their team apart. Save that by all accounts, barring her absence things seemed to be going fine. Qrow seemed to be present in their lives, Tai looked happy, the girls were happy & Summer at least seemed happy though we know she was covering up a lot of dread.
Keep in mind Tai is projecting Raven, the woman he blames for destroying the team and damaging the family onto his daughter who literally kept the family together after Summer died. Yang's established this, Ruby has established this, its canon.
Yang: I had to pick up the pieces. I had to keep things together. Alone. (pause) Weiss, if you have something to say, then say it.
Ruby: If you thought we wouldn’t come for you, then you must’ve forgotten who raised me.
Tai was not the one holding that home or family together. Unless you think the writers are gonna randomly swerve & say both Yang & Ruby are big whiny liars for some utterly nonsensical reasons. So no, I don't take him seriously as a narrator or critique of Yang, I have no reason to.
But let's push on, because I'm not done.
Taiyang: You both act like the easiest way to tackle an obstacle is through it. (pointing at Zwei) That strength is all that matters in a fight.
Ah yes, Raven, the woman famously known for thinking the easiest way to deal with an obstacles is to tackle it head on. That's why she spent years adorning herself in a Grimm helmet that hid her eyes & raised a False Maiden to serve as her body double.
A woman so inclined to rely on her own raw strength that when she was ambushed by Salem's forces she decided to trick them into an ambush.
Then when fighting Cinder and was at a disadvantage she freezes her in place while making Cinder think she is going on the offensive leaving her to be crushed by Stalactites & also utilized mind games to distract her & deal the finishing blow... Cos she only relies on strength.
As to his final piece of advice I already address it up above, there was no way around Adam, the situation was fucked from the start.
Saying it was Yang's fault she was dismembered is no more than victim blaming, I stood by that in Volume 3 to to this day & beyond.
Taiyang: But if you just take a second look, then maybe you see... (walking toward her, stepping around Zwei) there's a way around as well.
But let's actually look at Seeing Red & if Yang listened to Tai's advice or if she not only ignored it but did the opposite of what he ordered.
Let's see she goes in with open aggression & emotions, and also takes many blows rather than going 'around' them somehow.
Yang, as if she were 'indestructible' outright tanks a massively charged up Aura beam for the purpose of increasing her strength.
Then burns through all of her Aura & Semblance energies delivering one direct blow, relying on it to save her & leaving her weak & tired.
Or in other words, she:
Yang didn't miss, but we know that isn't a real issue anyway.
Yang used her Semblance to 'win' the fight & very much did rely on it to save her.
Yang expressed anger & many other emotions in the battle & still continues to does so.
Yang willingly took huge risks that involved her being able to take tons of damage rather than go "Around" the problem.
Yang knew Adam was likely stronger given it was 2 V1 but relied on her Semblance to get her out of that bind and she was in fact left weak and tired.
This is also the first time she has done several of these things, or otherwise demonstrated these traits, such as being left weak and tired or willingly tanking big attacks rather than just being hit by surprise or due to being overwhelmed.
I don't take Tai's advice seriously because none of it was accurate or aligned with the Semblance we saw in action or had described to us.
I don't trust Tai's opinion on Yang because his take on her is explicitly informed by Raven & not the Yang we spent four & then five more volumes getting to know.
I don't take Tai's words over Yang's, Ruby's or what we see on screen because Tai is at best a secondary or minor character & a recurring theme in RWBY is the failure of older generations.
These failures are not just in the past but how they have been consistently failing the next generation as the story is being told. There is zero reason to think Tai is some magic exception to this narrative trend when much more well explored characters like Maria, Qrow, Ozpin, Ironwood, Raven, and hell, Summer Rose are not.
& that is my stance on that, thanks for tuning in!
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