#this is kinda spicy and i may regret this but tally ho

[someidiotwithalaptop]

So... about the "Ironwood Was Right" thing.

I recently saw this resurface a bit, in the context of Ruby's regrets in Volume 9. Basically, taking the fact that she felt like she'd failed as the show saying that yes, actually, she was wrong to go against Ironwood's plan in Volume 7.

I feel like I went into thinking about this trying to debunk it on a logical level. Like, is it actually a good idea to fly off into the sky in one big long stalling measure when your opponent is literally immortal? What's stopping Salem from grabbing all the rest of the relics and then just waiting as many generations as it takes, until the people of Atlas forget why they came up there in the first place and return to Remnant out of curiosity?

The thing is, treating it as an argument about what's the more "rational" choice is missing the point that like. We're talking about a story. We don't know exactly how many people are in Atlas and in Mantle and where they are and how many more trips they'd have to take to finish the evacuation, because details like that would just bog things down.

This is not a trolley problem with x number of people from Mantle on one side and y number of people from Atlas on the other. This is a trolley problem with a wealthy and powerful person on one track, and a disadvantaged person an alternate track, and Ironwood choosing to pull the lever instead of trying to stop the trolley. The point is not "how many." It's not about math. The point is that there is a fundamental difference between dying in the central location while a bunch of Huntresses and Huntsmen do absolutely everything in their power to protect you, and dying abandoned in the mines you used to work while the city built off of your labor flies away to safety.

The question this conflict is asking is about whether or not other people can be sacrifices. Ironwood says yes—team RWBY disagree. That's the actual crux of this argument. Does Ironwood have the right to decide who deserves protection and who isn't worth the risk? Do we get to give up on other people before we've even tried to save them? It's about the idea of certain people being disposable. Mantle's wall isn't important, Amity is. Amity will protect all of Atlas, and that wall will only help the people in Mantle. It implies that their safety is an acceptable sacrifice for the greater good. It treats them as disposable.

There's a reason it was Nora who spoke up and pointed out that it's always Mantle being asked to bear the burden for the greater good. Nora has been a disposable person before. Hell, Cinder has been a disposable person! The way Atlas (through the madame) treated a living person as a resource to be exploited or sacrificed is the entire reason that Cinder is trying to burn the kingdom down. Thematically, Atlas cannot escape the danger she poses by sacrificing more disposable people.

One of the biggest themes of this show is cooperation. It's all about how Salem can only be defeated by working together. But working together is not possible if certain people are taking on all of the risk, all of the sacrifice. Everyone has to be willing to put some skin in the game. Like, imagine trying to do a group project if you knew half of you were guaranteed to get an A no matter what and the other half weren't.

So the idea that Volume 9 is supposed to come back around and say that actually, that plan that would have literally divided a city in half and cut loose the poorer half like fucking ballast, that was the right thing all along and Ruby Rose was wrong to challenge it... that would be an absolute disaster of a thematic statement.

This is not a show about hard military men making hard military choices. It's not going to contrive a situation where cold-blooded calculation determines that the right thing to do is to pull up the ladder. Because outside of weird philosophical experiments about trolleys, the right thing to do usually has more to do with empathy. Compassion. Cooperation. All that gay shit.