#ty for reading this far. more unhinged takes at 5

[ash-and-starlight]

modern au and esen’s honkers are haunting the instagram feed

[thedeadthree]

😭 👪 🌹 🌌 🔪 + Anya!

GABBY BELOVED. hello hii dear! i hope ur doing well and having the loveliest day/night! ty so much for asking about the current girl occupying the headspace!

OC EMOJI ASKS (x)

😭 CRYING - what makes them cry? do they cry easily?

to her, all her ability to cry was lost to her the day her dad died. after that, and for a straight month afterwards, then a period where she refused to utter a SOUND for a 5 month period.. she hasn’t and refused to let anyone push her to the point of tears again. these days, she prefers to make OTHERS cry (like the true villainess she is ajsknas). and to push her to that point it would take the death of her uncle, or worse so, the one always at her corner for as long as she could remember and love of her life ash. these two remaining anchors would be enough to do it. and given that anya possesses gravikinesis AND umbrakinesis aka: the abilities to manipulate shadows and gravity itself, for the worlds sake ONE BETTER HOPE NOTHING HAPPENS TO THEM.

👪 FAMILY - what is their family like? what is your ocs relationship to them? does your oc have any siblings?

YOU ARE ASKING THE BEST QUESTIONS GABBY i literally adore u for that omg. the can of WORMS this is jsdndah. so there is her father who passed away by assassination, her estranged mother, her uncle luka (and current head of the family) the man who has raised her since her fathers passing a decade prior, her babushka and dedushka.

her family relationships are... complicated? her mother, a superhero who separated from her father to continue her career in hero work (she chose her celebrity and reputation in essence kdosja) THEY HAVE NOT SPOKEN SINCE THAT CONFRONTATION and its a good thing! it would take a LOT for her to like.. make anya forgive her. (like when her mother comes asking for help in the story its gonna be INTERESTING jksdfkjf). her and her uncle have always been close! this is her closest familial connection, the number one supporter of her succession as the head of the morozov crime family AND her desire for vengeance against her fathers murderers. her relationship with the rest of her family, her babushka and dedushka and the morozov crime family is good..? she has a high respect for both of them and is poised to take the seat as head of the family. its a good relationship! her dad passed away and to be truthful the only person who could have been her anchor towards a more altruistic path.. had he still been alive she would have chosen to become a vigilante just as he was. :’) he was her anchor, her favorite person.. CRYING.

🌹 ROSE - do they like valentines day? have they been confessed to before? have they confessed to anyone before?

she likes it fine! annushka’s thoughts these days are more veering towards her 25th birthday and her divine vengeance against her fathers killers skansk, but she likes the holiday fine! its nice to be appreciated by her admirers u know? 😌 and she has! many.. MANY times. she has had more than her fair share of admirers, and although they were nice, looked nice and the gifts were as well.. none of them were all that appealing. she actually hasn’t! anya is one of those under the expectation that if she loves someone, she doesn’t need to tell them for them to know! perhaps its bc shes got a particular person in mind to give that honor to and this is all just an excuse sajhnsd.

🌌 MILKY WAY - what was the inspiration behind your oc? what was the first thing you decided about them?

this is my fav question ahh I adore talking and reading about inspo behind characters ☺️!! i had an oc from a LONG while ago from something from a different thing and she is the successor! (a far more unhinged, far more vengeful and villain aligned oc!) also! the lasombra from vtm (the RUTHLESSNESS and the shadow manipulation!), DANY very inspired by daenerys (the domino of tragedies in a short time that led to her losing control), and a bit of witcher 3 ciri! (the revenge kill of imlerith for vesemir and anya wanting to kill her fathers murderers) i also was very inspired by her umbrakinesis when I made her pinterest board and so a lot of that has elements of shadow and the black and white aesthetic, this is also the first thing i decided for her! and that her name/nickname would be anya! ive always wanted to name an oc anya, and was waiting to find the PERFECT oc to fit that and! she did!

🔪 KNIFE - how do they react to injury / misfortune befalling their loved ones (significant other, family, friends)? do they put themselves at blame?

NOT WELL NOT ONE BIT. as she is on a hunt for BLOOD in regards to her fathers killers, and how she handled her fathers death and her own misfortunes as a whole. the whole declaration of making the ones who have wronged her pay for what they’ve done to who she cares for and who has cared for her, to wrong her loved ones is a VERY bad idea! one that’ll cost you! she’ll raze the entire city if it means divine retribution sadsjndai. she doesn’t! whoever had misstepped on those she loved its THEM who hurt them and it’ll be THEM who will be sorry! but she used to blame herself!

[inflammatoryfandomblog]

on blake and running away

this post will be just me rambling about some tension i’ve noticed in the show for the longest time, yeah? i'm not trying to like, take people’s favorite characters away from them or whatever, but it’s me trying to come to terms with the fact that “running away” seems to be a very common theme for WBY... and for BY, it’s handled a bit oddly.

adam is mentioned as a matter of course, but i don’t really look at him the way you are used to--i don’t talk about the race stuff at all. i exclusively look at his abuse to Blake here; let it not be said that i’m so hung up on the race stuff that i ignore this part of his character. but if talk about abuse triggers you, you may not want to read this--it doesn’t really talk about personal experience at all and it’s not graphic, but this is a deeply personal Topic so i will warn you right now.

since this is long (no, really, it’s long as hell because it takes some explaining, and it’s more me trying to wrap my head around this than coming to a conclusion), i’ll stick it under a readmore:

Hello there!

Now, let’s all get on the same page, shall we? We all know that Adam’s a slimy creep in the show, right? And that most of his words to Blake should be taken in the context of what he intends to do and comes forth from his character?

This is a pretty basic observation... the things that characters say can be safely assumed to have a purpose in some way. Like Adam saying “my dear” or “wow we finally have alone time!” or whatever crap isn’t meant to be taken at face value as romantic, right? In fact, because Adam is (supposed to be) charismatic and an emotional abuser, you should generally assume there is some ulterior motive to what he says. (If this isn’t obvious to you, see Blake telling Yang that Adam only has power because of his manipulation in the Brunswick Arc.)

Which kind of strikes me as weird because... this isn’t really in line with how the writer’s depend on Adam’s dialogue sometimes? At certain points you’re supposed to take his framing as basically true--think of when he yells “what does she even see in you?” which ... is supposed to be taken by the audience as “see, even Adam sees their relationship, in case you haven’t gotten it yet!” rather than the kind of meaningless unhinged statement an abusive, jealous controlling asshole would make,

And like, if it were limited to rare instances like this, I wouldn’t really care about it that much, I would just take the unnatural dialogue as the audience clue-ins they’re meant to be and take Adam’s talkativeness in the final fight as RT being excited that Garrett Hunter can finally do the bare minimum of voice acting. But the reason it bugs me is because Adam was previously used to outright tell us Blake’s supposed character flaw of running away and we were just... supposed to take it at face value?

So, Adam constantly taunts Yang during their volume 6 fight, reminding her of Beacon to no end. And if you know Adam’s character, you’d know that this is meant to be intimidating shit-talking to Yang and to get her to attack him. It’s not even really subtle. “You’re a coward! Just like [Blake]” etc etc etc

(The fact that it doesn’t really work at all in this fight and he fucking keeps taunting her even when it clearly doesn’t work is the reason why Adam is annoying as hell during that fight. I’m salty that I was forced to be put through his voice acting, yes, I’m allowed to be petty.)

Remember this line of dialogue from him, because it’ll be important later: “You’re a coward! Just like her!” He frames her running away as a flaw pretty consistently, and this actually lines up with her character arc:

So flashback to the earlier volumes, right? Blake’s self-identified flaw is that she “always runs away” in volume 2. In that infamous volume 3 fight, Adam says, in response to Blake’s “I’m not running!”: “You will.” And that’s what happens, and it’s supposed to fuel most of the Yang-Blake drama in subsequent volumes. 

Volume 4 has Blake outright say that the reason she ran away was because she wants her friends to hate her so they can be safe, and Sun basically tells her, “you don’t have to be alone, your friends are here.”

In volume 5, Yang reinforces that this is supposed to be a trait of Blake, and it’s also framed negatively: “she ran!” Now Weiss contextualizes this in their talk by basically saying that Blake is lonely and she ran away because she wanted to protect them, and Yang repeats the whole notion of “she doesn’t have to run! We were here for her.” In that very same volume, Blake  “now he can see what it feels like to run away” when she successfully out-organizes Adam. The parallel between Blake now having Support and Backup and Therefore She Doesn’t Need to Run Away Anymore, while Adam Lost His Influence and Therefore Must Run Away.

In the V6 ending  song “Nevermore,” Blake’s first singing part implies that her running away is a character flaw that she got over by killing Adam:

Will I be afraid (Adrienne) Nor will I run away (Casey) It's behind me (Adrienne + Casey) Freedom is finally here (Casey)

So it’s clear that the story the show wants you to take away from this is that Blake always runs away because she views herself as a burden to her friends and won’t let them help her, and she needs to open up more and be more confident in her value as a person and push people away. Her arc is about that in volume 5, where she defeats people via the Power of Friendship. She spells out her character arc to Sun in volume 5, chapter 5:

“I’m going to try and help [Ilia] the way you helped me. You showed me that sometimes you need to be there for a friend even when they don’t want you to be. I was drowning in guilt and fear, and I tried to push you away, but you didn’t give up on me. And I can’t give up on Ilia; it’s about time I saved my friends for once.”

Blake’s character arc post-season 3 revolves around being comfortable with relying on support and supporting others, and that helpfully stops her from running away and lets her face her big problems. 

This would all be all well and good if it weren’t for the fact that running away actually isn’t the bad thing that the show tries to frame it to be, if you were to judge by what actually happened in the events of the show and the actions of other characters, and this is where my big beef with Blake’s arc comes from. I’m going to argue that running away wasn’t actually a character flaw Blake had at all, and the show treating it as such is it basically siding with Adam on this particular issue.

Blake has run away 3 times in the show’s runtime thus far.

1. The first time was in the Black Trailer

2. The second time is in volume 1 when she inadvertently reveals herself as an ex-White Fang member to Weiss

3. The last time is during the epilogue to volume three when she absconds to Menagerie

All three instances were actually valid and ended up being good for Blake. (1) is her escaping an abusive relationship. (2) leads to her finding Sun and opening up to a fellow faunus for once. (3) is Blake running away back to a support system she already had--her parents, who are pretty loving and accepting of her. The fact that she ran away might be the best thing Blake did--yeah, it wasn’t perfect, Yang was hurt--but objectively, Blake reconnected with the people who love her unconditionally and she was also there to save her parents from being murdered by Adam.

To pile on to these instances, Blake’s personality is actually rather confrontational. She constantly gets in arguments with Weiss in volume 1, and in volume 2, her character arc is basically her freaking out because they weren’t doing enough about Torchwick. 

But but but--! I hear the objection to this statement--Blake in volume 2 herself said that she always runs away from her problems! Checkmate atheists!

Well, dear reader, it’s not. Self-perception isn’t necessarily always true, especially if you’ve been emotionally abused before, as Blake has been. In volume 2, Blake sees herself as a coward who runs away all the time even though this is directly contradicted by her personality and actions.

Now, who in her past might benefit from framing “running away” as a bad thing? That leaving him to “run away” to other people means she’s a coward?

If you bothered to remember the quote I told you to remember earlier, it’s Adam! Adam stands everything to gain by telling Blake that running away is Bad; stay with me, Blake, don’t run and abandon me like your parents did. This would be the most striking and lasting example of emotional abuse, directly related to Blake’s self-perception and tying into a lot of the things she does in the show.

Would be. But the show sort sides with Adam here--running away is Bad. Adam is, according to the explicit messages of RWBY, what the show wants you to believe, right in saying that Blake always runs away. 

But she doesn’t. Hell, she doesn’t even run away from him when the going gets tough, and Adam himself doesn’t even believe that Blake is a coward. Remember the first time she him saw in in volume 3? They were really far apart and Blake could have just ran, but Adam stabbed a random civvie knowing that Blake would rush in to protect him. And like clockwork, Blake indeed did attack Adam to try to prevent harm.

(And yes, Adam used the exact same trick to lure Yang into attacking him, except instead of stabbing a nondescript extra, he stabbed Blake. Connections!)

This kind of stuff partially why I’ve always been uncomfortable with the abuse backstory, because much like the racism stuff that I have a problem with, the show just... ignores the big elephant in the room. Blake already had this self-image discrepancy going on in the first 3 volumes, but it never properly gets addressed again. Like with the violent-but-not-extremist White Fang and Sienna, it gets a throwaway line to explain its absence: “Yeah, look, Adam called Yang a coward! We’ll just vaguely nod at this!” But Blake’s arc proper? There’s nothing about coming to terms with her running away or using it as a concrete in-story example of her untangling Adam’s abuse--that might actually get people uncomfortable, you see--so it slowly gets morphed into the safer and easier plotline of “see, you just need to let yourself rely on people!”

And it’s weird that it got dropped so easily because “running away” is pretty much a... not a theme, but a thing three of the four main girls have going on. Yang has abandonment issues because her mother up and ran away--in fact, the language of how Running Away is Bad and Cowardly is brought up in the talk-ju-jitsu scene with Raven. 

This is probably the easiest connection in the world to make--Raven and Blake both ran away, but as far as Yang is concerned, it’s okay with Blake because... “she came back,” which... uh??? uhhhh???? It uncritically accepts that Running Away is a Bad Thing--it’s the coming back part (which wasn’t even an intentional thing on Blake’s end; she didn’t even know RWBY would be there) that “redeems” Blake’s sin--see Yang’s “you came back!” and Weiss’s “she will [come back.]”

Which... is actually kind of weird in light of how Running Away vis-a-vis Blake is handled (ie, she gets the notion that it’s a bad thing from Adam--but certainly she shouldn’t go back to him). The show didn’t need to do everything in its power to frame Running Away as a bad thing; it could acknowledge that while it may hurt somebody, running away is sometimes the best thing you can do, and this could actually tie into Yang’s abandonment issues, because if there was a character that also needed untangling with the concept of Running Away, it was her. 

But it seems like Blake and Yang won’t really talk about any of this in the future, because we can’t have conflict because of people’s differing experiences with running away, apparently. Blake’s act at the end of volume 3 did hurt Yang and potentially... swept under the rug, because Blake Came Back, Guys! We can put a ring on it now. Because getting over abuse is always straightforward, you will never make mistakes trying to heal yourself, and there are never hard decisions to make! 

I never see people talk about this, so maybe it’s worth a mention. But Weiss is also technically guilty of Running Away--from an abusive household, in this case, much like her sister. And here, much like with Blake, it’s a good thing. But with Weiss, the narrative actually admits that leaving was the right thing to do for herself and her character arc is actually about that. So it’s exceedingly strange for me that Blake doing the exact thing Weiss does is a “flaw” she had to get over, instead of something that could be looked at and digested.

Blake’s experience with abuse is an element that never seemed to really resonate with me personally, because what I saw on screen and what was implied didn’t add up perfectly. I like the message of “support systems matter” of Blakes volume 4-5 arc in concept, but it never felt exactly right, because what Blake actually resolved and what was visibly her problem never felt 1:1 to me.