#RWBY Jessica Cruz | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

metawatts · 1 year ago

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Saw your review for the jl/rwby crossover. You mentioned Cruz as being one of the failures of the movie. Kind of leaves me conflicted because honestly she was kind of my favorite part of the movie while everything else was just mostly meh or frustrating. I am not that familiar with comic Cruz and the Incarnation I am more familiar with from DC superhero girls is very different from the comic from what little I know. Care to do a deep dive on this particular GL and how the crossover failed her?

Alright, I have some time to do asks, so lets dive on in! I was gonna write this out way better but my dotpoints kinda became their own essay so here we go!

TL:DR: I think that Jessica's anxiety was mishandled due to a fundamental misunderstanding of how her character is built in the comics, because they wanted a Cute Agoraphobic Queen (and forgot to have the agoraphobia). I also think that she lacked agency in her own mental health and plotline, with Jaune being the main mover in both, and that there is whitewashing to her design, as seen here compared to: other cartoons, other comic runs, her other rwby designs (feat. one Simon Baz because DC is keeping him from me)

Yeah. Hm. Anyway, lets get into my rambly thoughts about Jessica Cruz

Alright first things first: I’m not against Jessica Cruz being written differently to the comics if she’s written respectfully. I also really do like dc superhero girls and Jessica there is very fun as a character, even if I have some other issues with what they took out from her storyline

The thing about this iteration of Jessica Cruz is that apparently the theme of the movie was ‘gun violence’ or whatever and that’s. That’s her whole. That’s literally her whole comic backstory.

For a quick recap in the comics: Jessica Cruz one day was hiking with friends before they stumbled across some guys dumping bodies in the woods. All of Jessica’s friends were shot down and murdered right in front of her for being witnesses, and Jessica gained an absolutely brutal case of PTSD, which later fuelled her agoraphobia and anxiety.

Then, after spending 3 years literally never leaving her apartment out of terror that she was going to be tracked down and murdered like her friends, she was instead tracked down by an artifact called Power Ring (it’s complicated but p much it’s like an Evil Inverse Green Lantern Ring). The Power Ring, which is fuelled by the wearer’s fear and trauma, forces itself onto Jessica and turns her into a villainous puppet for it’s own will. She’s canonically being tortured by physical and psychological pain the whole time she’s wearing it. She’s nearly saved a few times from her Literal Possession but the thing that sticks is when she pulls a self-sacrifice and supposedly dies, only it turns out that the ring died in her place and then she got a Green Lantern Ring for her bravery in facing her fears and such. (I think the universe/writers were apologising because Genuinely WTF)

Now, the thing that a lot of people praise about Jessica as a character in most comics, is that she is, most of the time, a very realistically-written character with anxiety. Her anxiety is rooted mostly in her PTSD, which means that it has very definite triggers, one of which is, on her bad days, ‘guns being aimed at her’.

However, Jessica is also someone who actively works on this aspect of her mental health, she’s shown having gone to therapy sessions, learnt how to internally combat her negative self-talk, and actively works on herself. She has her coping mechanisms, and they genuinely work for her when she’s spiralling, and she’s able to work through her anxiety and remind herself that, in what is one of her main catchphrases ‘you are not your fear’.

DC Superhero girls pretty much just axed Jessica’s anxiety entirely and while she’s a fun character she’s also not really close enough to comics Cruz for me to really draw comparisons, although I do wish they’d been willing to explore that storyline (and maybe have Simon there) I understand why with the age range they didn’t decide to throw in Gun Violence and Anxiety (but they could have had Simon there where are you keeping him dc)

Meanwhile: RWBY/JL Jessica Cruz. Well. I don’t want to hate on people who like her. If you found joy in something that I did not, then I’m happy for you, but I do want to explain my problems. The first is the way they misrepresented and mishandled her anxiety, and the second is Jaune. Why does it always have to be Jaune, I don’t even hate Jaune, I just hate how much everyone in the writing rooms love him.

Anxiety: Jessica in the film is pretty much given a much more generalised anxiety disorder. She mentions that she’s had it from a young age, that she’s always been afraid, that the ring helped her fit in. She’s given a much different trigger of claustrophobia, and her agoraphobia is completely missing from her character. DC Superhero Girls took away her anxiety, so there’s nothing to misrepresent. RWBY/JL put in her anxiety, and put in the wrong one.

Comics Jessica’s anxiety, and her insecurities, come from a genuinely traumatic event, one that shaped her for years, one that she’s still fighting overcome. And then worse stuff happened to her and she kept going. I have a generalised anxiety disorder, I’ve had one since I was a teenager, and I can also say that how it was shown in the movie was… kind of stereotypical. She’s meek, and she shy, and she’s nervous and jumpy and doesn’t feel like she can do anything. And this is meant to be Jessica who still is that adult, just in a teen brain, and I know hormones suck, but they completely axed the fact that this is canonically a character who has mental health issues and works on them so they could have Jaune peptalk her through her panic attacks, which. Cures them, all of a suddenn

Yeah we’re getting into the Jaune stuff now. Jaune is the catalyst for everything Jessica does. He makes the plans while she worries, he talks her through her panic, he talks her through all her anxiety, and then… that’s it, really, all she does from that point on in the movie is Solve All The Problems. The emotional core of most of their scenes from post-Jessica confessing her anxiety disorder up until ‘the claustrophobia panic attack’ is on Jaune missing Pyrrha so much that he ignores Jessica actually trying to be reasonable about ‘this is sus’. It feels like they wanted to do ‘Jessica gets a best friend who helps her through her anxieties and supports her to stand on her own’, forgot to write the second part of that, and forgot one other tiny lil detail

WHICH IS SHE HAS ONE.

Simon Baz is Jessica’s Green Lantern partner in the comics, they’re your classic ‘hothead/cautious’ duo, they have literally the best interactions of friendship ever, this is the man who worries that Jessica’s not feeling okay after a bad day and shows up to make her pancakes for breakfast. They also have a real interesting quirk to their specific brand of green lanterning, which is that Hal Jordan was like ‘okay you need to learn to work together’ and fused their Power Batteries together. (quick rundown: green lantern rings need to be periodically charged up with lantern shaped power batteries otherwise there’s no constructs or cool costumes). Simon and Jessica cannot recharge their rings separately, they have to work as a team. And the first few comics of their run are great (I know nothing about the state of it now). They’re mutually supportive, they both have their issues, and Jaune feels like he was written to slot into that role.

I get that ‘we can’t have two green lanterns in here that’s boring’ was probably what was said but this is also what speaks to a wider issue about how Jessica is getting a lot more press time in non-comic properties. Which is awesome! Overall I love her character, I love the different takes on her, and it’s very cool to see her. Simon Baz, however. Is. Not getting any of this. Which is a shame. I just wish that my duo could get to be a duo.

But, I mean, if dc superhero girls is willing to just completely nix jess’s anxiety from her, why not nix Simon Baz’s backstory and still have him be her partner there? Why do all these properties decide that Jessica is best written when all of her character stuff beyond ‘female green lantern, occasionally nervous’ is removed from her? This isn’t just a rwby problem, but it’s something I’ve noticed especially in the rwby movie because of how they took Jessica’s character, when her backstory as it was would have tied into the so-called ‘theme’ for gun violence, and stripped her entirely for parts about ‘Jaune is a nice caring friend look how protective he is of poor scared Jessica’. He even powers her up for HER big 'ending the bad guy' move instead of allowing her to be as strong as a green lantern ring is meant to be

Jessica in the film is pretty much written as ‘nervous agoraphobic adorable widdle queen’, all of her actual agency, all of her own inner strength of being someone who struggles with anxiety and overcomes it is removed so that she can be a Pep Talk Recipient, and I gotta say another small thing: pep talks, in my experience, don’t actually cure a chronic generalised anxiety disorder.

Oh yeah and also not only is her Green Lantern outfit in this crossover really not good (everyone is, except vixen, vixen’s power is too strong for rwby character designers to truly damage), she’s also definitely whitewashed to the point that I think a lot of people would find it hard at first to know that she’s meant to be Latina. Like, even compared to her Adult Version, or her rwby comics version, or, say, some of the other animated versions of her, or even her comics version in The Good Runs, as shown above. I called her ‘ben 10-ified’, and I stand by that, it’s just… it's a bit eesh, considering rwby's other problems with colourism and such.

I think all the DC characters got massacred, but if this had to be the anxiety rep for the film, why couldn't it be the Jessica who was actively working on dealing with it, dealing with her self-talk, like this?

I know rwby's allergic to character development, but come on. Jessica is more than an Anxious UwU bean. That's kinda the whole point. Also, she plays pokemon, what's not to love?

#rwde #rwby x justice league #rwby x jl #justice league x rwby #jl x rwby #rwby-meta #chara-meta #mod watts #RWBY Jessica Cruz #RWBY Green Lantern #asks

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