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dextixer · 2 years ago

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RWBY: Arowfell - CRWBY Anti-Union messages follow-up

Warning: Long Thread

Link to the original Reddit thread - HERE

Greetings, just last week i made a thread covering one of the characters and their portrayal in the new RWBY game by the name of RWBY: Arowfell. While i am glad to see that my opinion was well received there was some push-back in various places that i wanted to adress/expand upon with this topic. Now, regularly, i dont do this, but i got a vacation for a week, so i think i will celebrate that freedom with more frequent posting, at least this week.

Regardless, on with the show.

"Its not intentional"

Many people when responding to my thread on various websites brought up the argument that the anti-union messaging that was done through the character of Hanlon Fifestone was not intentional. That at worst it was simply ignorance or a coincidence. In the same breath some people have accused me of having a "political bias" in this matter and that is why i brought up the topic.

There are multiple arguments that i want to present to argue my case.

First of all, art is not random, its intentional. This is one of the things that is taught early in literature classes and that is looking at what is hidden. The choices that the writer of a work makes have meaning, even if it is something as simple as the curtains being blue just because their house has blue curtains. It is hard for me to take the statement that Hanlons portrayal was not intentional when there is a LOT focused on him. For a character that is an one-off villain, he is given more cutscenes and is shown to (on-screen) act more villanous than other characters. Him smiling when abusing a woman half his size with worker clothes on. Him growling when talking. Laughing maniacly when attacking. These were all intentional choices made. Hanlon could have been ANYONE, he could have been ANY character with ANY profession. And yet he is an union leader? Someone had to choose that.

But even if the detractors are correct, and its intentional. Does it matter? What i mean is, is this portrayal excused due to ignorance? The writers have already pleaded ignorance on the subject of the White Fang, RT itself has been long under fire due to their treatment and views on people of colour and culture of bigotry that they have festered. Its nothing new. So, let us say that choosing Hanlon as an union leader was just a coincidence, just a fault of ignorance. Does that make it any better since RT should know better at this point in time? Once bitten, twice shy, no?

Both of these arguments also run into reality of how Unions are perceived in the US. For a long time now people could have hear not only rumours but news stories about work-places in the US unionizing. It is not something new. Coca-Cola has allegedly funded militant groups to intimidate and kill union workers in Colombia. Starbucks, Amazon. These are already well known stories. None of these things are unkown. So the possibilities are that either RT wrote Hanlon the way they did intentionally, or that they were so ignorant of their surroundings that they missed some of the biggest union movements in the US. I do not know which is worse.

"Hanlon Fifestone is not the main villain"

Some people seemingly were confused or thought that i thought that Hanlon is the main villain of the game. That is not the case, i even acknowledged in the thread itself that Hanlon was not the main villain of the game.

What i stated is that Hanlon is the most villainized enemy in the game. Just to repeat. He growls when speaking, he maniacly laughs when attacking, we see him smiling and being smug while extracting fear from a woman half his size and then after being caught he activates a device that ends up destroying villages through Grimm.

That is an incredible ammount of villainization compared to other antagonists of the game. Some people argued that the main villain of the game Bram Thronmane is the bigger villain and the main villain of the game. They are factually correct, but thats not the point i was arguing.

I was talking about VILLAINIZATION.

What some people do not seem to understand is that a PERCEPTION of a villain is important regardless of their actions. By how they are writen and portrayed, villains that do more harm can be less hated and less noticed by villains that have done less harm. And media has used this fact many times in fiction of all stripes.

Let us think of RWBY itself. Who is more hated? Cinder or Salem? Cinder is. And yet factually she has done less damage and is less of a villain than Salem. Then why is she more hated? Because she killed Pyrrha and because we have seen Cinder and how she acts. When we talk about villainization, the factual damage that a villain causes is not as important as the emotional impact they have on the audience.

Its a simmilar case with Star Wars and the comparison between Vader and the Emperor. Emperor is factually worse. And yet he stands in Vaders shadow in both being known and in being hated in many cases. Because we can actively see Vader kill characters we may grow to like and do attrocities personally.

And that is the point i was making with Hanlon. Yes, Bram organized the entire plot of RWBY: Arowfell. He is the one who "recruited" all of the other antagonists and was the one to cause the most damage. But his cutscenes, his dialogue, his movesets do not villainize him like it is done with Hanlon.

There is no victim that Bram is holding by the throat. There is no growling at our protagonists.

Its the PORTRAYAL of these characters that matters.

While there are short dialogue blurbs saying about how Hanlon was forced into his position, he is not made to LOOK like he was forced into his position. That is why i intentionally made a comparison to Harper in my last thread, because she WAS made to look like she was fooled/forced into her position, unlike Hanlon who besides a few lines shows NONE of that.

"Its racist for you to call out Hanlons portrayal"

Some people decided to see my thread and call me racist. Partially because of the intentional misrepresentation/misunderstanding of the above points (By arguing that by me seeing Hanlon as more villainized than Bram, that indicates in racist because Hanlon is a person of colour and Bram is white) and partially because i brought attention to the unfortunate history that RT has had with making people of colour, antagonists.

It is fact that almost the entirety of the protagonist cast is white. It is a fact that some of the earliest depictions of people of darker colour in RWBY were open stereotypes. It is a fact that a lot of people of darker colour serve antagonistic roles. Pairing this with a culture at RT that has been called out by people of colour that worked there, i dont think it is going too far to point out that RT has problems with how it handles racial representation in its works.

That is why i called out the CHOICE of Hanlon Fifestone being a person of colour. Because it was a CHOICE that was made. And once again, if its due to malice or ignorance, is up to you to decide.

Those same people then choose to state that because i said that Hanlon was clothed as a bandit/pirate, that i was racist. Because in their words Hanlon is "dressed like a working-class black man", they then acused me of racism, because according to them, the only reason i saw Hanlons clothes as pirates or bandits is because i am threathened by people of colour.

Before going into a clothes analysis here, let me just say that this very much feels to me like gaslighting that exists in media discussions where if you see a portrayal of a stereotype, you are now a racist because you noticed that stereotype. Which results in "If you call out racism, you are racist" kind of BS. I never thought i would see actual alt-right level of argumentation in the RWBY community, but it does have a way to surprise me at times.

So, lets go to Hanlons Clothes.

Anyone who tells me that THESE are the clothes of a "working man" is either directly lying to my face, or they are so sheltered and ignorant that they have never seen a working person in their entire lives.

For the record, a lot of my family are builders with various qualifications due to how easy it was to find construction work in Scandinavia a decade or so ago. I have personally worked in a plastic factory. hanlon does not look like a worker.

A bandana? A designer jacket? Fighting gloves? A button up shirt with a belt on the chest? This looks nothing like a worker! Not seen here is that he also wears shoes, not boots, which is very much a red flag.

THIS is what a workers outfit is, and even THIS outfit is missing a LOT of safety equipment and depending a job even more. For some specialized types of work there is also more colour. Our factory had blue overalls for example. Road workers have orange vests. Yellow hardhads are traditionally used in many places. Hanlon Fifestone does not look like a worker. Instead he looks like a:

He looks like a pirate. Once again, characters are not designed with NO REASON in mind. The shirt/jacket combo that Hanlon wears is stereotypical pirate design, paired with a bandana and a belt on the chest (That would hold PISTOLS) make it more than obvious what the design inspiration is.

But wait, there is MORE, because RWBY, the main show has ALSO used this design:

For a BANDIT, because the design ques between a stereotypical pirate and bandit depictions tend to follow simmilar trends in general unless they start specializing more in their other specific looks, like pirates only wearing shirts and bandits being able to be designed with heavier armor.

Shay D Mann also takes the same design inspiration, minus the bandana which is instead on his neck (Once again, a stereotypically bandit depiction, most often seen in the Western genre with them being used to also cover faces).

Conclussion

Like i said, this is meant to be a short follow-up thread adressing some of the extra arguments that came out of the initial discussion. I dont expect to return to this topic again, and tommorow i am going to cover how team RWBY is portrayed in RWBY: Arowfell, or more specifically, how in my opinion they are incredibly flanderized versions of their V1-V3 and even Chibi counterparts rather than their V7-V8 selves.

Do keep in mind most of the things i stated here are my opinion and i welcome disagreement, criticism or people adding on to my thread.

#rwby #rwde #rwby: arrowfell #Hanlon Fifestone

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oddlyhale · 2 years ago

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Cannot Get Over Fifestone's Bigoted Writing

I wasn't expecting anything special from RWBY: Arrowfell. I kept assuming for months that Arrowfell would just be a polished version of Grimm Eclipse, with a nothing story and a nothing gameplay.

I heard the gameplay isn't anything special. Just mash X and you'll beat the enemies. But the STORY is quite the package that needs to be unpacked, and not in a good way. I was already convinced to not buy the game, but this context makes me disgusted.

I had to rewatch the Fifestone scenes to make sure I'm not being fooled. Did RT, an abusive company that treats its workers like absolute trash even though they've tried to make us believe they are inclusive and respecting of minority groups, really make a UNION LEADER a villain/boss?

Yes, yes they did.

Fifestone's writing has been compared to how Adam was handled. I can see what they're saying: a civil rights leader is written to be an abusive person that is only in it for themselves. But I'd argue that Fifestone's writing is grossly worse because, while Adam's writing has been argued nonstop on how it was handled, Fifestone's is blatantly obvious. As if RT doesn't care anymore, and essentially gave everybody the middle finger and said, "stick this where the sun doesn't shine because we hate workers and we hate you."

You can't walk back Fifestone's writing. It's as black and white as it looks. A dark-skinned union leader is being written as a big, mobbish threat to the small and weak workers who are fighting for their rights. "There was a time where I used my semblance for good," Fifestone explains. His dialogue is as straightforward as can be. He was once a good guy and is now written as a bad guy, for the sake of the plot. He said his semblance was used to ease tension before, but now we see that his semblance is painful and wretched when used. How is this possible? How can it be painful now when he used it for good before? It doesn't matter, because an evil union leader must go down.

It seems to be a running theme for RWBY. Any leader who is doing something different from RWBY has to be taken down a notch. Not just by the teams, but by the writing. The writers always have to load them up with abusive traits, narcissism, and obsessive behaviour. It's the only way they know how to make Team RWBY look correct, to make their actions of taking down these corrupt leaders look OK. But what it can't hide is evidence of RT's bigotry.

It is absolutely abhorrent that RT had the gull to make this villain and have their animators animate Fifestone. It's almost twisted. And make no mistake, this game took a while to create, meaning they knew exactly what they were doing way before the Kdin fiasco blew up on Twitter. We understand now that they're anti-union.

And what a super funny way of making minorities the enemies of Arrowfell, isn't it? Privileged characters like Team BRIR and Harper can get away with it, but characters like Bram and a union leader need to be put under the jail. Even a dumb villain like Glass. "A new threat to Arrowfell," is just a group of minorities that need to be put in their place by our privileged heroes.

And yes, I'm actually shocked that James Ironwood was left alone in this story. As a huge fan of the General, I was always betting that the writers would at least try to make him look bad to make V8 ""justified.""

Color me shocked when they decided to turn their bigoted direction to vilifying their minority group instead, and it's not the White Fang.

James has been relegated to being the quest-giver. He's written now to have an overall neutral good presence to everything and has no strong emotions towards new development. He stays calm and cool and acts swiftly for the team. Team RWBY has been given the wheel to drive this bus finally, though I can't say it was good... that's a whole other post, but I have my gripes with how the team was written.

I don't know what exactly the writers were trying to do with this story. Surely they're not that morally detached from what they're putting on paper? Well, after everything that happened on Twitter and with Kdin, it's not so far-fetched to call them morally corrupt AS MUCH as they try to convince us that they're totally not.

Fifestone has been on my mind ever since. Everything about Arrowfell may as well be thrown out the window because it doesn't matter. His story is obvious as obvious can get, and it is disgusting.

Nah, not even stans can walk this back.

#rwde #rwby: arrowfell #fifestone

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