#to respect his boundaries that she has set up FOR MONTHS. don't turn the conversation onto how he fucked up once you can have a separate-

[hazmatazz]

like go fucking cunt your boyfriends shouldn't feel like they're walking on eggshells everytime you're around. no wonder neither of us wanted to kiss you because we were so disinterested because you made us feel fucking awful!!! oh my god

[lucytara]

1/2 Hey I don't know if you have seen Eruptionfang's video about Bumblebee but I have question to you now that I saw it. I know people don't like him but I thought that video was not hateful and he explained himself well. But looking at the video and comments people are saying B&Y never got the same narrative development as B&S. And in someway I agree. Like B&S spend a lot of time outside of school together and obviously the two volumes as a whole. And I think we can admit Blake had a crush on

2/2Sun for a while. But I think they ignore the manga where we see B&Y relationship in school. In the animation we don’t see them as much interact like that but the manga makes it clear in my opinion that they have a close relationship and spend time together but it seems like a lot of people think contrary, as they have only seen the animation. But I don’t know seeing those comments made me doubt how much I watched it the way I wanted it. Do you think the narrative was there?

fair warning that this ended up turning into uhhhh…..a long post so welcome to rwby: a bumbleby vs black/sun narrative analysis

so i haven’t watched it, and in regards to it being not hateful, i think you first have to look at the intent behind it. first of all, it’s not his place to discuss this topic whatsoever. this story isn’t being written for him. it’s not being written for men. it doesn’t matter what y’all think about it, quite frankly, because it’s not for or about you: it’s about us, people who have never in history seen the kind of representation rwby is giving us with blake and yang. that’s something anyone who wants to “have an honest opinion about bumbleby” should think about. he didn’t. he ignored that, ignored the tons of wlw who love this portrayal and relationship. that tells me really everything i need to know about him as a person. the intent of his video is to bring people around to “his side” of things, his perspective, here’s why bumbleby was done wrong, b/s was done right, etc whatever. the intent behind him creating and posting this video is hateful. let’s be very clear about that.

the problem with people trying to claim that bumbleby came out of nowhere or that black/sun had a ton of now-pointless development is that their claims are almost always viewed through a heteronormative lens. they look at blake and sun on-screen together and they think it’s development. they think blake being visibly annoyed with sun for the entirety of volume 4 is romantic. they think his total lack of understanding her character but pushing her boundaries anyway is romantic. they think blake owes him her own feelings in return for his, just because he feels them. they think that because it’s a narrative that’s been popularized by media for literally…well…ever.

from a wlw perspective, for those of us who ship bumbleby, did not read sun and blake’s relationship as “development” in a romantic direction. i’ve always said that sun was a red herring. he appears - another faunus - at a time blake is desperately looking for someone to understand her. except he can’t! sun had a great life, so it seems! he thinks the white fang are nuts! he has nothing to do with any of the hardships blake has faced throughout her entire life. sun never understands her and he doesn’t, at any point, relate or empathize with her. he moves on very easily with his life after the incident with the white fang and torchwick. he tries to ask blake to the dance. she says the one line that lets us, the audience, know what she’d hoped from sun and wasn’t receiving: “i thought you of all people would understand that.” he doesn’t understand. but an episode or so later, someone does understand blake, and that person is yang.

this is really the Big “oh” moment for me. blake was looking for someone to understand her in sun, but she was looking in the wrong place. yang comes in unravels blake in the span of a single conversation. she understands blake perfectly, understands where she coming from and why, and most importantly, understands how to get her to stop. how to put things in perspective. burning the candle was honestly all the narrative we needed in regards to sun/yang/blake as a starting point. sun isn’t who blake wants him to be and this is where she’s started to realize that. this is where we, the audience, are also supposed to realize that.

sun and blake have then, what, one moment in v3? where he flirst with her in a stadium full of people and she blushes? sure, whatever. i’m not denying that on some level i think blake wanted to be interested in sun. i don’t really buy that she fully was, but i think she wanted to be. however, the last half of the volume, blake’s entire focus is on yang: yang, who she watches attack mercury, and rather than believing her immediately, finds herself shaken and reminded of adam. in this conversation, we’re told a couple of things: one, that yang and adam are parallels. blake is comparing them herself. the implication is that yang is also someone very dear to blake, and blake’s afraid of the same thing happening. but she ultimately believes yang when yang looks her in the eye.

then - a quick telling moment - blake’s eyes narrowing when hearing cinder describe yang attacking an innocent student. she immediately realizes yang was set up, and she was wrong to not believe her. this is important because imo this weighs on blake from the finale onward.  

if we use some critical thinking skills, we can infer that blake and yang have spent quite a lot of time together up until the v3 finale. they’re literally partners, teammates. they share the same dorms. they’re together almost all the time, for - what - like 9 months or so? we can imagine they know each other pretty well. blake picked her to begin with. they’re close; we don’t have to know every single detail, especially considering the format rwby is presented in. 

v3 finale - yang finds weiss, who tells her ruby’s still missing and so is blake. sun? also right there. doesn’t go look for her. yang makes the decision to prioritize blake and goes after her. we all know what happens now - adam takes one look at blake’s face and to yang and knows she’s someone blake loves. yang loses an arm and almost dies trying to protect her, blake almost dies trying to protect her immediately after. blake holds her hand and tells her she’s sorry while sun looks on at their joined hands. 

like, there’s the narrative set-up. all of it. it’s right there. yang/adam are paralleled and yang immediately loses to him. he gives them both scars that link them together forever. they’re never going to be able to take that night back. they’re bound by it. they have the literal. scars. to prove it. and sun plays no role in it. people who ignore this in favor of the very surface-level development bs get are doing extreme disservices to the characters and the show itself. 

i came in at the end of v3. i was elated all throughout volume 4 because blake literally was not interested in him, she wasn’t interested in his advances, and her heart was clearly elsewhere. she spent all of volume 4 upset that sun had followed her. she even has one last-ditch moment on the ship - where sun says “i knew exactly what you were doing” and she perks up for a moment before he hits the final nail in the coffin and completely misinterprets why she ran. like, that’s the end for bs romantically, right there. when sun still proves after all this time and everything that’s happened, he fundamentally doesn’t understand blake. 

they had zero romantic interactions all throughout volumes 4 and 5. what they did have? friendship development. blake and sun essentially started over their entire relationship with blake finally in the right mindset to process it. she didn’t like sun, she never really liked sun, they’re incompatible and now she really sees that. so they work their way to a friendship, which is exactly what myself and most people in the bb fandom saw. blake wasn’t interested. it doesn’t matter how much sun was. both people need to be equally invested or a relationship is nothing. blake wasn’t interested. there is no way to retcon that or get around it. she doesn’t like sun romantically. she makes it explicitly clear, and i don’t respect anyone who chooses to ignore that. heteronormativity in media has taught us forever that what a girl wants/how she feels doesn’t matter as much as what the boy does, that perseverance is key, but that’s a fucked up narrative and i’m happy to see it subverted here.

anyway. during this period of time that blake and yang are apart, they’re constantly on each others’ minds. blake voices it once or twice; yang snaps one time and breaks down about it. we can infer that what hurt yang the most wasn’t losing her arm, it was that blake ran. yang wanted to be there for her. yang carries a photo of her around, so worn in the middle that it bend automatically, used to being grasped on blake’s side of the frame. these are details meant to imply certain things. yang misses blake and thinks about her more than she ever dares to say it aloud. 

all of this builds both to them reuniting and volume 6. weirdly enough (not), a majority of the fandom predicted blake and yang’s dynamic this volume. we predicted exactly how blake would act, how yang would reciprocate. we predicted this accurately because we understand exactly the story crwby is telling and how it plays out. we knew blake and yang spent however long apart thinking about each other. we knew blake felt enormously guilty and sorry and regretted ever running in the first place, and we knew she’d promise yang she’d never do it again. (this was slightly more split, but) plenty of people predicted yang would forgive her instantly, because all yang wanted was to be by her side. we knew this because this story is being told to us and for us. 

sun says it himself: it was never about romance where he and blake are concerned. she’s with who she’s supposed to be with now, and it’s not him. the show told us all of this. 

someone’s inability to view a narrative through a different perspective than their own skewed one does not make it a bad narrative. rwby has done exactly what it’s intended to do with blake & yang, and if all of us - as our fandom is mostly comprised of wlw - could pick up on that perfectly, then the narrative is not the problem. the problem is the homophobic/heteronormative lens with which you are viewing the show through.