#no hate for RWBY

[mygenderisashrug]

RWBY Villains could be scarier

I'm not a writer, like at all. I have no idea how to write a show and CRWBY gets a lot flack they dont deserve. I just wanted to give my opinion on the villains in RWBY. I've had this idea keeping me up at night, I just wanna get it out. Don't worry I haven't seen the newest volume so no spoilers here.

Cool? Cool. Alright down the rabbit hole.

We have our big bad in RWBY, Salem (also the Gods suck too but that's just me.) And we have seen some really creepy Grimm.

I mean the nuckelavee

The apathy

Horrifying. Grimm can and should be scary. They are monsters who are basically immortal who can learn as they get older. How smart can they get?

They can learn when to attack humans.

They can apparently use magic.

When I first saw Salem I assumed she was some subspecies of grimm who looked like human. Maybe to trick dumb humans. Like I can't shoot this grimm it looks like a girl. And then she kills them. I imagined she was like a queen bee who could lead her armies to destroy mankind and all their creations. So what if the members of her roundtable were all grimm too. Grimm who have lived long enough to be intelligent.

It would make the Grimm more than a horde you have to get through. But a force of nature that truly wants to end your entire species.

We have a wicked witch so why not other antagonists from other Fairy Tales. Since we already have Tyrian in Canon, I'm thinking a Grimm modeled after the Scorpion from Aesop's fable. Tyrian normal, creepy. Grimm Tyrian with six red eyes, giant pincers and a stinger, nightmare fuel.

And that's not all, we could have the Big Bad wolf, the jabberwocky, the Queen of Hearts, Wendigos, any story we tell our children to make them behave. It would make those grimm extra creepy. What have they done to survive all these years. How strong must they be to never be purified by huntsman of the past. They aren't just mindless, soulless beings but an organized force. All working together with the efficiency of a ant hive. Have you seen that video of a colony of ants working together to steal eggs from a wasp hive? Like that but bigger. Without ego or any human emotions.

Just trying over and over again, learning from each failure until they succeed. Mankind's worst enemy. And if the protagonists don't get it together, Mankind's end. But that's just me.

[chittychittyyangyang]

Volume 9 Bees

[amelia-yap]

gotcha!

[catsvrsdogscatswin]

I've had this thought swirling in the back of my head for a while, but it's finally congealed enough that I think I can make a coherent pitch, which is: I think RWBY's problems with the more vitriolic part of its fanbase partially stems from the fact that RWBY is a deconstruction that doesn't advertise it's a deconstruction.

RWBY's status as a deconstruction is pretty textbook. It takes apart standard fantasy, shounen, and anime tropes in order to analyze them and their deeper meaning and then reassembles them in new and interesting ways for the plot/characters/series. Thing is, it never says that outright in promotional material, which can lead to later outrage in fans.

See, unless their way of discovering new shows is to close their eyes and stab their finger at random, most people tend to choose series to watch/read based on expectations. Maybe a friend said they'll like it because it has [insert thing], maybe they read the summary and were intrigued, maybe they thought the poster/cover art was cool, whatever. These small pieces of information are generally enough for people to make a snap-judgment of the style and genre of the series, which they can then gauge against their personal tastes and decide whether or not they want to try.

Most of the time, this works just fine. Well-written deconstructions also generally give the viewers some warning/buildup before they take a hard swerve. See Madoka Magica: the magical girl paradigm is shaded by the possibility of death as soon as we're introduced to it, then there's an onscreen death with blood, and then a few episodes later we eventually realize the Faustian bargain of it all. Even innocent viewers who stumbled into watching it, unaware of the show's reputation, would go "Oh, wait, this is not going in the direction magical girl shows usually go" by a third of the way through.

The thing is, with RWBY, this does not happen unless you're paying a lot of attention and/or looking for it. And neither the cover art nor the summary nor, I believe, the fanbase gives a lot of warning about the swerves ahead.

In fact, RWBY initially bills itself as a pretty standard shounen anime. The main protagonist is hinted to have Special Powers and gets into the Magic Monster-Hunting School in the first episode, and the first two-and-a-half seasons are taken up by her and her friends' superhero-esque slice-of-life shenanigans as they thwart robberies and terrorist attacks and gear up for a tournament arc against the looming background of a larger conspiracy.

Then in the last half of the third season the villains' entire Rube Goldberg machine of a scheme snaps into completion and the plot twists so hard the entire genre takes a hard right. If you're used to character analysis and common anime tropes, this is not completely a surprise -up until this point, RWBY's character arcs and plot have been subtly traveling in non-traditional directions that hint of greater flexibility in genre treatment ahead- but if you're not... well.

Thing is, people watching RWBY up until this point have signed up for pretty standard shounen and they've been getting it, but the third season's ending smashes that all to bits. From then on out in RWBY, it's like they ordered fries and suddenly got a hamburger. It might be delicious; but it's not what they asked for, what they wanted, or what they paid for, and they are, justifiably, displeased.

So when the reasonable people either adjusted their expectations or sighed, shook their heads, and clicked back out (perhaps with a grumble and a scowl), the unreasonable people dug their heels in and began insisting that everybody was Getting The Show/Character Wrong and that CRWBY is ruining it, because the fact that RWBY's method of deconstruction is to put standard tropes in a blender and then arrange what's left in deceptive patterns means that said unreasonable viewers can scan the bare surface and argue that all the stereotypical stuff is clearly still under there, somewhere.

So they're continually trying to drag RWBY back to the tracks of a typical shounen anime series (it's closest relative), which creates a dissonance between the show they're watching and the show they think they're watching. They're trying to turn the hamburger back into fries, basically, except that doesn't work and just frustrates everyone involved, because you're trying to make RWBY into something that it's not. Hence, this attitude probably starting/fueling some of the more contentious statements in the fandom, i.e.:

"Ironwood was right the whole time" (in most action movies and shounen anime, allied military leaders are trustworthy beyond reproach)

"Adam's character was wasted" (we all know how much shounen loves their powerful warrior antiheroes)

"Ruby and the others are in the wrong about [insert thing]/or for doing [insert thing], and this is bad writing!" (shounen protagonists don't usually make more than One Very Big Mistake over the course of their entire careers, which is usually fixed/overcome/redeemed via an appropriately rigorous training arc)

And to be clear, there's nothing wrong with shounen tropes or shounen anime. They're wonderful storytelling devices in their own way and their own time: but if you want standard by-the-book shounen without any new and interesting concoctions, then RWBY is definitely not the show for you. And most people don't find that out until it's too late.

[juanarc-thethird]

[rubyfunkey]

rwby mood lately.. might do jnpr+o next

[almea]

The start of the Bees' literal battle couple era

[yangscowlick]

Because the “shrodinger’s queerbait” nonsense will never go away, indulge me an analogy (and a long post).

wlw ships are the “made from scratch” cake in a world where we only ever expect cake mix from the box.

Say you have a show where, in the first interaction between a male and female character, there is a red box. It could be a Betty Crocker box of cake mix. Because all it takes is just one smile — one wink — one raised eyebrow— and the fans don’t question it. We’re clearly making a cake here. The box is red.

Meanwhile, you have two female characters building their own relationship that have elements that could build to romance. There are eggs in the fridge. A few more episodes, there’s flour in the pantry. Sugar. Baking powder. Queer fans start whispering…we could be making a cake here. Other fans scoff “you will read into anything. They’re just eggs! Everyone has eggs in their fridge!” Maybe so, maybe not. They are written off as discrete ingredients, nothing to see here.

That red box is still sitting in the pantry. Obviously we’re going with that one, and it’s definitely cake mix. That guy and girl stood next to each other again.

The wlw relationship is now full-on batter. It was a cake recipe all along, but it’s not baked yet. The crowd that wrote off every ingredient is now saying the writers are just going to “squander” that box that could be ready-made cake mix or that they’re being “forced” to bake a cake with the very ingredients the writers deliberately bought and put in their pantry.

Now it’s in the oven, the cake is baking. That crowd will still insist it’s forced, or maybe its actually something else, or it’s rushed, or it’s pandering. Whether the writers painstakingly built a pantry to make the cake they truly wanted or they were cultivating good ingredients and realized they had the fixings for a more decadent cake and went there, it doesn’t matter. It’s still a recipe. One that fans who always have to piece together ingredients had hoped for or saw from the get-go, despite being scoffed at and disparaged. Just because that crowd didn’t see (or refused to see) those ingredients as part of a whole, doesn’t make it any less of a recipe.

And wlw fans shouldn’t have to keep writing essays to demonstrate that the wlw “cake” has all the ingredients every cake mix does, or keep pointing out that fans were ready to believe a cake was being baked when they saw a nondescript box, but that they’ll do anything to discredit or doubt the cake from scratch that’s now cooling off on the counter.

It is partly a function of heteronormativity from the audience in immediately seeing romance in any whisper of interaction between m/f characters and passing off all charged interactions between female characters are sisterly or platonic. And it also comes from writers, who are either being cautious so as not to spook corporate overlords or audiences, or who are preserving plausible deniability.

To take the analogy further, box cake mix is fine! It works! It is, practically speaking, what a lot of folks know by default. I thought I was a Duncan Hines girl once myself. Vanilla cake mix has the ingredients measured out, it’s a safe bet, it tastes like cake.

But it doesn’t mean every red box is cake mix. And it doesn’t make the cake that had to be pieced together from scratch due to censorship, caution, time, narrative build-up, what-have-you, any less of a cake.

[mrrayneysstuff]

Cinder: HOW?! HOW AMONG THAT WHOLE GROUP OF IDIOTS DID I LOSE TO THE WEAKEST OF THEM?! NO, I REFUSE, THIS IS NOT HAPPENING! DO YOU HEAR ME ARC?! THIS DOESN'T COUNT, NEXT TIME I'M GOING TO CUT OFF YOUR DAMN HEAD AND HANG IT ON MY WALL AS A TROPHY! YOU'RE GOING TO WISH YOU DIED WHEN I GET MY HANDS ON YOU!

(in the distance)

Jaune listening to Cinder's screams: Cool, I broke his brain.

[goddessofbees]

I really liked the outfit for a more feminine Tim, so.... Here's JayTim

Raccoon eyes

[lesbianneopolitan]

'Ascension'

[rwby-confess]

Confession #276

[chittychittyyangyang]

I am a citizen of a fallen kingdom and an heir to nothing.

[dinodogs]

I automatically lose any trust in someone who says they don't like Blake. Not even because I'm a huge Blake stan or anything. But like most of the time its because she happens to be a survivor of abuse who was forced into a situation where she had to kill her abuser/groomer and they think she's a bitch for that or some bullshit.

[deuyr4]

jaune offfffff arc.

[gaymakima]

fanon Jaune Arc is the most insufferable dudebro stand-in I've ever seen. he's the definition of mid. you could replace him with any bland isekai protagonist or harem protagonist in fics and there'd be no difference. if you go into any other character tag there's a 90% chance there'll be multiple posts of characters talking to each other about how cool jaune is. if you go into ao3 and do the same you'll be bombarded with jaune harem fics that all start to melt together after you've scrolled through 40 of them. he's so far removed from canon jaune. that's not my boy. my boy does not have rizz or game (except for that one time with pyrrha bc she's INTO his failboy persona). he is a soaking wet dog who was born in a cardboard box. i will kill fanon jaune with my own bare hands and then give canon jaune a blanket. can you tell ive been looking through character tags and going on a block exodus.