#continuing to be normal about razing vale

[bestworstcase]

I think what strikes me about the razing of Vale is how it directly parallels what Ironwood and Atlas did, but also what VALE did to Mountain Glenn.

After all, Vale also was the reason that Mountain Glenn was doomed in the first place. They abandoned the people of MG to their death under the pretense that they couldn't do anything for them. And it's even worse when you consider the fact that Mountain Glenn had a fully functional underground TRAIN NETWORK that reaches directly under Vale, in parallel to Atlas having cargo ships.

If anything, it proves that Vale DID have the means to save the people of Mountain Glenn by using the trains to take citizens to safety while Huntsmen or soldiers probably could have held the line and stopped the Grimm from following. But they, like Ironwood, chose to abandon them to their fate to save themselves.

After all, the set up of the situation is something like this according to Oobleck:

Mountain Glenn is built. People transferred from Vale to MG. Mountain Glenn has no natural protection, and thus was besieged. MG people go underground.

But here's the thing though: If they went underground, why didn't they just get back onto the underground trains to escape?

It didn't say that the tunnels were swarmed, only that an explosion opened a different cavern that exposed an underground Grimm nest. If anything, it didn't say that this happened immediately either. There's definitely a noticeable gap between when they went underground, vs when the explosion is implied to have happened. They more or less outright stated that "it was a safe haven", and from looking at the background, there were plenty of half-finished underground buildings there that strongly implied that they were able to keep things going for a period of time until they found the Grimm nest.

What it seems like to me is that Vale didn't even attempt to help them evacuate via the underground, and just sealed them up to die.

They were foreshadowing Atlas as early as Volume 2.

So in a dark sense, Salem's destruction of Vale is karma finally coming after the Kingdom of Vale for willingly leaving their former citizens to die in such a horrible fashion.

yeah this is pretty much where my thinking is, especially in light of how important the mountain glenn arc’s character development was in v9 and how—& i was saying this last year while the volume was airing!—in the ever after the girls answered the herbalist’s question (“what are you?”) but didn’t answer oobleck’s (“no, that is what you do; i want to know why you do it”). so there’s this driving sense that the answers are unfinished and that intersects with oobleck’s entry into the narrative at this moment of personal crisis for him in his failure to prevent another mountain glenn. and then a key theme with the mountain glenn arc is that history is important.

“if you can’t learn from it, you’re destined to repeat it.” and “i see lives that could have been saved, but i also see an opportunity—an opportunity to study these ruins and learn from this tragedy.” on its face, it’s easy to take oobleck’s perspective to mean that he strives to better understand how to fend off the grimm, but oobleck is not the grimm studies professor nor does he express any particular interest or concern on the matter of killing grimm (to the point that the girls get irate with him for not fighting, and he’s the one who tells ruby not to provoke the goliaths).

he teaches HISTORY.

in jaundice we get oobleck talking about the faunus revolution like: this may seem like ancient history to all of you, but it isn’t, it still matters, there isn’t a faunus in this classroom who hasn’t been subjected to discrimination, this kind of hatred and cruelty breeds violence, just look at what happened to the white fang. and then he hits his two most disinterested students with “history is important, if you can’t learn from it, you’re destined to repeat it!”—like. oobleck tries SO HARD to get his students to grasp that the historical faunus revolution and the modern-day white fang are the same. that this is history repeating itself because humankind refuses to learn.

and that sets the stage for mountain glenn. what does it mean that oobleck sees in this wasteland a “dark reminder” of vale’s “greatest failure” and lives that could have been saved and a chance to learn from it to ensure that it won’t ever happen again, and this is what motivates him to BECOME A HISTORY TEACHER, and specifically the kind of history teacher who teaches the faunus revolution by confronting his students with the truth that persecution at human hands is what drove the white fang to violence? what does that say about him? about the failure he sees when he looks at mountain glenn?

more to the point:

the theme of the mountain glenn arc is that we must learn from history to avoid repeating the failures of the past. this is a throughline that runs through the rest of the story: the girls hear what oobleck is trying to teach them, and when the wolves are howling at the door and the general orders them to abandon the people of mantle to save atlas, they refuse. and they stand their ground, and they try, and they save EVERYBODY. the failure to save mountain glenn is not repeated, because oobleck taught them that.

now vale has fallen, and oobleck sits on that refugee ship in abject despair because he feels the weight of his failure crushing down on him—and, narratively, the most important question is, “is he right?”

like, did he fail? is the destruction of vale something that constitutes a failure?

not a defeat—that’s not the same thing. vale suffered a catastrophic defeat. but were there lives that COULD HAVE been saved if the ones who made the decisions had chosen differently? is oobleck standing in team rwby’s shoes, someone who did the very best he could and saved absolutely everyone it was possible to save, or is that ship full of refugees atlas leaving mantle behind to die?

THAT is the crucial question, because the failure of mountain glenn is not that the city fell but rather that there were lives that could have been saved. and that distinction has to be made, because otherwise the lesson that was not learned, the failure in vale’s destruction, is… what? that nowhere is safe? that no amount of geographical advantage or aggressive border defenses can save you from an inexhaustible onslaught? that mountain glenn was doomed from the start and it was naive to think vale could be different?

is rwby that kind of story? no.

mountain glenn was doomed from the start. its eventual destruction by the grimm was inevitable, oobleck says, because the city was established in grimm territory. but there were lives that could have been saved.

atlas and mantle were doomed from the moment ozpin used the staff to raise atlas; it was inevitable that the staff would be used again, by someone, for some reason, and as soon as that happened both cities would be destroyed. but there were no lives that could have been saved, because they saved EVERYONE.

vale, too, was doomed from the moment salem set herself to razing it; by sheer force of inexhaustible numbers and the ability to outlast anything done to her, her destruction of the city was inevitable. but were there lives that could have been saved?

and even more importantly, are there still lives that can be saved?

here’s what oobleck says of mountain glenn:

WEISS: What does history have to do with this? OOBLECK: Why, what a preposterous question, you silly girl! Why, history is the backbone of our very society! …And the liver! And probably the kidneys, if I were to wager. WEISS: And that means...? OOBLECK: The southeast quadrant outside of Vale is home to wild forests and deep caves, but it is also the location to one of the kingdom's greatest failures! RUBY: Mountain Glenn. YANG: That's right! It was an expansion of Vale... But in the end it was overrun by grimm and fenced off from the rest of the city. OOBLECK: Correct! And now it stands abandoned as a dark reminder.

and:

OOBLECK: Mountain Glenn! Yes, an expansion of Vale that was inevitably destroyed by creatures of grimm! Previously home to thousands of people, working people commuting to the city, the main city! Developed a subway system to the inner city! Grimm attacks increased! Population in danger, now desperately searching for shelter! City evacuates into the metro tunnels and what do they find? The southeast quadrant of Vale is known for wild forests and deep caves! […] OOBLECK: No, no, Mountain Glenn was Vale's first serious attempt at expansion. It worked for a short period of time, thanks to an aggressive perimeter defense and unique transportation; the city developed an elaborate subway system to carry citizens safely from the new territory into the main kingdom! Sadly, without the many natural barriers Vale had to protect its borders, Mountain Glenn was doomed from the start! As the end drew near, the citizens of the territory made one last attempt at survival: they took up shelter beneath the city, in massive caves that they had cleared out for the subway, and they cut themselves off from the surface! YANG: An underground village? OOBLECK: In a matter of speaking, yes. A safe haven. Until... an explosion opened the mouth of another cavern, filled with subterranean grimm. After that, the Kingdom officially sealed off the tunnels, creating the world's largest tomb.

and the undercity looks like this:

not even half-finished buildings, at least some of these look like completed structures that are now falling into ruin—and this isn’t some haphazard shantytown cobbled together out of scrap, these are huge high-rise apartment buildings! the mountain glenn undercity lasted a long time, months or perhaps even years given the scale and complexity of construction that was completed before the explosion punched a hole through the cavern walls into a nest of grimm.

the thing that most interests me about oobleck’s account of mountain glenn’s demise, is… like, the sequence of events seems to imply that vale cut the territory off when the upper city was overrun. the people living in mountain glenn “made one last attempt at survival” by retreating into the subway tunnels… which they did not use to evacuate to vale. instead they built an underground city in the cavern surrounding the subway system, and lived for what seems to be quite some time with grimm quite literally nesting on top of them.

think about the nevermore perching on the hard-light dome over amity coliseum. now imagine building a town in the arena and living there, under that nevermore, for a year. that’s what the people of mountain glenn did, instead of using the existing subway system to evacuate to vale. why?

why, in a world where human civilization is so defined by existential terror of the grimm, would they do that, unless they had no other choice? vale “officially” sealed off the tunnels when the undercity was overrun, but…

i mean, we see what happens when you bring thousands of people who’ve just survived the destruction of their homes to a new place: a days-long onslaught of grimm drawn by the refugees. vale isn’t walled. it doesn’t maintain a standing army. if thousands of refugees had flooded into vale after mountain glenn collapsed, the grimm would have been right behind them.

and… mountain glenn was a working-class suburb of vale. the people living there commuted to vale every day to work. they were probably quite poor compared to the average person living in vale—which is another parallel with mantle—could they afford to relocate to vale, if vale refused to provide housing for the mountain glenn refugees? was it a choice between having an apartment and enough food to eat in mountain glenn or being homeless and hungry in vale where everything was astronomically more expensive? were they, like mantle, just “a few city blocks” if vale’s leadership thought of them at all?

history is important. if you can’t learn from it, you’re destined to repeat it.

mountain glenn is vale’s history. did vale learn from that history? i think—narratively, for the purpose of contrast with the fall of atlas—the answer is probably no. and that means salem’s destruction of vale is less dark karmic justice than the wheel of history repeating itself; the city has been overrun.

but—mountain glenn’s people outlived mountain glenn itself, by retreating into caverns and building the undercity. so i think the big question with regard to salem razing vale is whether this is the “as the end drew near” part or the “creating the world’s largest tomb” part of the story. is everyone who didn’t make it onto that ship dead, or are they making one last attempt at survival by retreating into the same tunnels where mountain glenn’s people carved out a safe haven for themselves?

there’s a constant repetition throughout this story of the idea of “beacons of hope” and “safe havens” and this is something i find quite interesting because, obviously, there’s a beacon academy and a haven academy. atlas and shade don’t get rhetorically name-dropped like this, but atlas was a beacon of hope (the city in the sky, promise of a better future!) and the kids are fighting to make shade a safe haven. beacon fell, atlas fell, but haven was saved. it’s closed right now, but it’s still standing and mistral is—as far as we know—weathering the storm. menagerie offers safe haven to the faunus who don’t want to fight, and salem has no plans to attack it.

the mountain glenn undercity was a safe haven, kind of. only no one came to help when help was needed—haven survived because menagerie stood to defend it. shade will survive because mistral and menagerie stand with it. if there are people hiding from salem in the undercity, they’ll survive because shade and mistral and menagerie come to their aid. you see how it gains momentum with every arc of the story? the beacons collapse alone and the havens stand together.