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45 – Volume 7, Episodes 7, 8, 9, and 10 | Table of Contents | 47 – Volume 7 Finale
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Alternate Title: It All Comes Crashing Down
Well, here it is. The part where everything we’ve built is broken down and swept under the rug.
I've been saying this throughout, but this season, it’s been…well, good. Not just ‘less bad than other volumes’, but actually good. Yeah, everything’s ugly, but writing-wise, everything…works. There hasn’t been any filler, the pacing is pretty good, there aren’t any severe missed points… When I was first watching this, I was thinking that Volume 7 needs to get bad, quickly, or it’s gonna make the story of RWBY that much more tragic.
Well, it did get bad quickly, and it did get tragic.
We thankfully start off on the same scene we left, with Ironwood vs. Watts. Watts has hacked the arena to his advantage, and both men have their handguns out.
Ironwood uses his black handgun, apparently loaded with gravity dust, to recoil-launch himself through the air much like Ruby or Yang would. He quickly makes his way up to the platform where Watts is, dodging bullets as he does and essentially flying, and smacks him over to another one.
Watts takes aim and fires back, to no avail, then scampers. Ironwood takes out his white revolver and gives chase, but with a twist of his hacking rings, Arthur manipulates the dust in the platforms, altering gravity to make it harder to catch up to him. 
Ironwood is just quick enough to chase him across his single-step mid-air platforms, but another flick of a switch later, and he’s caught in a geyser. He doesn’t let this deter him, however, and is quickly giving chase again, learning the environments quickly and keeping up with Watts’ manipulations. They start firing at each other again, and Watts is counting down either his own ammo count, or Ironwood’s.
Ironwood is quicker on the draw and knocks Watts off his landing, sending him crumpling at his feet. The beatdown ensues, but slippery as ever, Watts squirms out of it, and quickly gets to running away again. Ironwood pulls out his gravity revolver, only for Watts to shoot it out of his hands with surprising aim. He starts altering the gravity in the platforms again, stalling Ironwood… 
Ironwood quickly realizes that this running around isn’t going to work, at least if he chases Watts like a shadow. He decides to slip around, and Watts has the audacity to think he’s in the clear when he turns around to check for Ironwood following him.
Ironwood blasts him right in the back, and Watts retaliates with his own revolver shot that freezes Ironwood’s leg in place—which Ironwood just shatters before charging him again. The two leap at each other in their gravity-affected cage of sorts, and this is a poor decision on Watts’ part.
Ironwood grabs Watts before he can run away again, slamming him to the floor, where his aura breaks after a truly pathetic showing—imagine if one of those cars had hit him when he was strolling through traffic, it would’ve been hilarious. Ironwood then tackles Watts away from all the gravity nonsense and back towards the floor of the arena. Watts starts lifting it into its cage match position, and starts ranting.
W: You never appreciated my genius, James! You just stood atop it and called yourself a giant!
The two start beating each other up, Watts enraged that Ironwood promoted the work of Pietro (“that fat imbecile!”) over his own. Ironwood gets Watts up against a pylon holding up the new CCT, and Watts levels his gun at his temple.
W: I suppose in this instance, my brains and your brawn are evenly matched.
I: You're smart, but you're not the only one who can count.
Watts has no ammo left. Realizing this, Watts seems to give up…before throwing his gun away and twisting around, throwing Ironwood into the pylon and trapping his arm with some sort of hard-light array cast from between his four rings.
Ironwood, when he tries to remove his arm from the barrier, finds his skin being burned off. Ouch. Except y’all forget that deadly four-letter word ‘aura’ again.
Your Fight Scene Sucks: 119
Watts laments that it’ll be work to rebuild those rings, and gets to leaving. Ironwood continues to drag his arm out of the trap inch by inch, and Watts taunts him about being eager to get more metal screwed into his body. This taunt only pisses Ironwood off, and makes him drag his arm out faster—he’s free before Watts can even get to analyzing the schematics of the CCT.
Ironwood, whose performance thus far has been a tad underwhelming of the relentless beatdown on Watts’ stupid face that I was hoping for, finally gets the lead out.
He slams Watts to the floor with his good arm, drags him along the ground, and holds him up at the edge of the ring, above a long fall to a pool of hot lava.
I: I will sacrifice whatever it takes to defeat her.
*irritated at the last-minute Subtle Foreshadowing*
Yes, that was very flagrant SUBTLE FORESHADOWING, because this show is about to go off the rails, hard.
Watts just smirks, spits blood, and says that he hopes for exactly that.
We cut to Mantle. In that alleyway where Qrow, Robyn, and Clover have Tyrian cornered, Clover tries to place Tyrian under arrest. Naturally, Tyrian just cackles at this. Qrow finally has enough and charges.
Tyrian holds off Qrow well enough, but the other two joining in is not to his liking, and makes it difficult for him to keep up. Tyrian leaps up onto the top of a building, deflecting a crossbow bolt from Robyn with his tail…which Clover then grabs with his fishing hook lance and drags him back down with.
The three of them start whooping on Tyrian, who is fast, but can’t hold off three opponents at once, and Qrow gets back in the fray, which almost seems to go sour—but he just socks Tyrian in the face the instant he’s separated from his sword again, like last time. Clover grabs him by the tail again, leading to more beating down, and Robyn pulls off a skilled arrow ricochet that catches Tyrian and deals the first truly significant bit of damage.
Tyrian, getting absolutely walloped, screams in rage, and just spins like a top to get everyone away from him. Robyn fires another bolt, which Tyrian catches in his teeth, surely thinking he’s had the last word—but that bolt then detonates, shucking the last of his aura.
Annoying motherfucker. He’s down at last. Robyn walks over and kicks him into unconsciousness, and Clover contacts command to get a police caravan here, which Tyrian will probably escape from. We cut to the next scene, which is Ironwood returning to his office, panting, with Watts’ duffel bag in hand. His left arm is heavily bandaged. He hears that Tyrian Callows is in custody, and he seems relieved…but then sees something that shocks him so badly he drops the duffel bag.
Back at Atlas Academy, Winter is directing the students to their dorms, and is just directing faculty and upperclassmen to help sort things out when she gets a call from Ironwood, asking if anyone was caught trying to enter the school while he was out. She says no, but it’s clear that the question even being asked makes her second-guess things. Ironwood asks if she’s sure, and she starts sprinting for the inner halls.
C: Still afraid, I see. Now show me where you’ve been hiding her.
Cinder, watching this through a window up above, seems awfully confident. But I would like to remind her that she just recovered from an insane ass whooping from Raven and had Neo beating her into the dirt about a week later.
We cut to the skies over Mantle, where Penny is flying on her thrusters. She’s been recalled to Atlas, and Weiss, in an airship headed to the same place, is confused over this matter, as the evacuation isn’t finished yet. Jaune directs RWBY to get to the general and find out what’s happening, while he, Ren, and Nora go and retrieve Oscar.
RWBY and the Ace Ops sans Clover show up in Ironwood’s office, where he turns around and reveals his arm in a sling…but something doesn’t seem right.
I: We have made a critical error.
He pulls out a burnt black chess piece—a calling card? Ironwood recognizes this symbol from the attack on Beacon, Salem’s way of saying she was inside. Someone was here, but with Tyrian and Watts stopped, who could it have been?
Ironwood starts to ramble, panicking, wondering if Mantle being attacked was just a distraction. Weiss tries to calm him, saying it’ll all be alright, since Mantle is on their side now. Ironwood only gets more agitated—what if that was the plan? What if the enemy wanted people brought into Atlas by the thousands? Right about now my mind is wandering back to that tidbit about Atlas’ floating island being held up by magic…
Irate over Salem constantly being ahead of the game no matter what they do, Ironwood cracks his desk when he slams his fist down on it. Ruby takes note of the chess piece.
R: It’s…glass.
Cinder’s calling card, then. Ironwood tries to use this to grab onto some logic, but all he can manage is logic driven by fear—if Cinder is here, is Hazel here, too? Blake tries to be reassuring, but Ironwood appears to have finally snapped from stress, wondering if everyone in the room is really on their side. He asks the question: how did Robyn know about the global communications project?
Nice going, Blake and Yang. Yang fesses up, but nobody is ready to hear her explanations of how it was for the right reasons. Anger and accusations fly, while the camera focuses on the duffel bag on Ironwood’s desk, and an unzipping noise is heard…
W: None of this matters right now!
I: Loyalty always matters!
The agitation in the room overflows and out of the duffel bag bursts a Grimm. 
The same type of Grimm Salem uses to communicate over long distances, the orb with hanging tendrils. Salem’s voice emanates from it, dripping with cold satisfaction.
S: General Ironwood…
You know what, fuck this scene and it’s “tension”, because where it’s about to go can suck a fresh hundred dicks and then some. Why is Ironwood the only one who draws a weapon?
That’s a Grimm. Everyone can see that that’s a Grimm—a hostile enemy. And that was goddamn Salem’s voice just now. Yet everyone, from RWBY to JNR to the Ace Ops, just kind of stumbles back in surprise and fear. Yang is the only other person who sort-of resembles taking a defensive stance via her arms, but very pointedly, her gauntlets are still folded.
I know why they did this. They did it for the same reason that we’ve been emphasizing for the last ten minutes and change that Ironwood will do ~*anything*~ to stop Salem, will make any “sacrifice” no matter what it is—because we’re trying to show James Ironwood as an evil bastard “flawed leader”, because he has a weapon ready at the drop of a hat.
And this is about where that achingly would-be-subtle bit of nonsense ends, and on an appropriately stupid note, because now even though Ironwood was supposed to look jumpy and volatile, he instead looks like the only one with a brain stem. All of these characters have weapons—hell, several of these characters pointed those weapons at Qrow for trying to interfere in the big blue lady’s story time vlog. Weiss is later going to point her sword at Whitley for not having a door open and a welcome mat laid out fast enough. Yet they all forget their basic training and all rationale to make this insipid highlight.
Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Veil: 53
Urgh. Moving on.
The Grimm cracks and crumples, falling to the floor and dying, only for the smoke of its corpse to coalesce into the image of Salem herself, who keeps speaking.
S: The brave huntsmen and huntresses bested Arthur Watts. Congratulations.
Ruby keeps her face set, and says that they stopped Tyrian and Arthur, and will stop anyone else she tries to send. Salem just says that victory was never the goal, only to set the stage. For what, Ironwood asks? For her, Salem says. The apparition drifts over to him…
S: Time isn't on your side, James. It's always been on mine. The people of Atlas have suffered enough. Surrender the staff and the lamp to me, and they needn't suffer any further.
Ironwood denies her, and she presses further, saying it can all end if he stops fighting a futile war. But Ruby pipes up, saying the lamp has showed them what Salem is capable of.
R: We’ve seen that you can’t be killed. But we’ve also seen you fail.
Salem is stone-faced and narrow-eyed at these words, and she drifts over to Ruby malevolently as the latter says that they don’t have to kill her, but they will stop her. Salem lets the hammer drop:
S: Your mother said those words to me.
Fear and doubt are placed in Ruby’s mind. Images of Summer on the cliff flash through her mind, the sky behind her dark. Salem says Summer was wrong, too, and Ruby starts to cry. Ruby’s silver eyes start to act up, and she falls to her knees, crying and holding her head. Yang runs over and holds her, and Salem, satisfied, vanishes.
Silence doesn’t last long, Blake and Weiss nearing Yang in concern for Ruby. The Ace Ops start to unravel, terrified at Salem’s presence in their home. She said the stage was to be set for her—is she on her way right now? But there haven’t been any alerts… But Vine says that the long-range alert systems are offline, no doubt the work of Watts.
Or, Ironwood says, they’ve already been destroyed. Gun still in hand, he drifts over to his window, looking at the airships outside. Blake, trying to be rational, says the Amity tower was ready to launch. That was true, right? It damn well better have been, since he was holding Robyn’s hand when he said it. But Miles and Kerry forgot that, given Ironwood’s silence indicates he stretched this particular bit of truth.
Ill Logic: 139
Road to Nowhere: 25
Make the incoming course-correction a little more clear, why don’t you. Yang realizes he said that just to lure out Watts. Weiss quietly says his name, and Ironwood answers with the following.
I: I’ve sent your sister to claim the power of the winter maiden.
He says that when he realized they’d been infiltrated, he determined that they couldn’t wait any longer. The staff and the lamp, he says, have to be locked away. Ruby, finally rising from Yang’s lap, says that he’d said they could keep the lamp.
I: Well… That was before you lied to me about the lamp. Before you lied to us about Robyn, before Salem was right on our doorstep.
For all her fears, Ruby ended up just like Ozpin in the end…
I: Before Mantle was nearly destroyed, and myself and my army were left exhausted.
Ironwood smacks the duffel bag off of the desk in his anger. Now situated at his desk, Ironwood says the timeline has changed and they need to act accordingly. He takes the black glass chess piece, and crushes it in his hand, saying the plan for the Amity CCT will be applied to Atlas instead.
Everyone questions what he’s after, and he says he wants to take Atlas itself out of Salem’s reach. They can build the CCT there, away from her Grimm and human minions.
B: But we’re nowhere near done evacuating everyone! You’d be leaving Mantle to die!
I: …Yes. I would.
Okay, see, I was on your side up until you said that, dude. What the fuck? Everything you’ve done up to this point has been to protect the people, but now you want to abandon them to the wolves?
*balling hands into fists* Because that’s what we’re doing now. You see, this is all one big giant band-aid, not for an audience reaction, but for a big, hideous laceration we’re about to perform. This all here? I know what you’re thinking—the spiral of fear and paranoia, Ironwood’s grip slipping on his situation…it makes for a good and compelling plot! It looks like we’re headed straight into the somber realm of the fallen hero, whose drive has warped their ideals into something sinister!
And yes, Miles Luna and Kerry Shawcross in particular were very direct when talking about Ironwood, saying at length that’s what this is. It’s not, though. They are going to tell one thing, and show another. And this time, it’s not the failure of translating the image in one’s head, that so often strikes unskilled writers. No, Ironwood, our alleged fallen hero, is going to leap off a building and crash straight into the depths of villainy in a manner that seems very, very deliberate. I’ll elaborate more later once we finally introduce a new count.
This course of action, he says, is the only way to keep the staff, the lamp, and the maidens out of Salem’s control. No one is on board with this—RWBY as a whole want to stand their ground, not fly away in fear. Ruby looks to the Ace Ops…but none of them is willing to defy the general. They remind the team that the military has already been exhausted defending against the Grimm, and there isn’t enough manpower left to defend against an even larger attacking force.
Ironwood is willing to declare martial law to achieve this course of action. Weiss is disgusted by this, and RWBY are unable to convince him or the Ace Ops. When asked who she’s loyal to, Ruby says she’s loyal to the people they’re trying to save.
I: We are saving who we can… And you’re standing in our way.
Ruby’s scroll starts to buzz. Jaune is on the line, saying they have a serious problem. Ironwood sees her hand drift towards her scroll, and moves to take it from her—but she speeds past him with her semblance, answers the call, and yells that Ironwood is declaring martial law and abandoning Mantle. She says that Salem is coming and spills Ironwood’s entire plan.
This obviously does not take too well with the people that were listening in, including Clover, Qrow, Robyn, and Winter and Penny, which never gets explained because it was only Jaune calling.
Ruby’s call is cut off by Ironwood via his own phone, and he apologizes that it’s come to this. He places RWBY under arrest, and leaves. Hey, turns out I was right about the Ace Ops being a miniboss squad! I’m sure you’re all shocked.
JNR has not found Oscar yet, and we didn’t hear what it was that Jaune wanted to tell Ruby. The episode ends on a shot of JNR looking at a pile of destroyed robots.
V7E12, “With Friends Like These”
Robyn is reacting with outrage to the news of what Ironwood is doing. Clover fruitlessly tries to defend the general’s decisions, but gets an alert that RWBYJNPRQ—Qrow and Oscar included—are now wanted. Clover approaches Qrow, who reaches for his weapon. Robyn is ready to fight, despite the fact that she’s not under arrest. Qrow tries to defuse things, but the fight starts anyway.
Clover knocks Robyn down with minimal effort, and Qrow is forced to defend himself. Robyn gets back up long enough to say this:
R: You can hug it out once we’ve taken him down!
…Really? All that, and people have the audacity to deny the gaybait charges? 
All it takes is a stray shot to uncuff Tyrian (toldja it would happen) and he quickly kills the driver of the ship and sends it on a crash course. We fade out to Winter and Penny.
Winter is wondering what Weiss did to make Ironwood want to arrest her. Penny is upset that Ironwood wants to abandon Mantle. Winter’s attempt to coast along with this plan is pierced, when Penny asks if it doesn’t bother her that everyone they just saved will die. Winter tries to say that orders are orders and her feelings don’t matter, and that they need to go. Penny refuses, saying these things should matter, and Winter tries to explain that Ironwood is making really hard calls for the good of everyone. Penny goes along, but makes it clear that she doesn’t see what’s good about any of this, and Winter quietly agrees.
Back in Ironwood’s office, the Ace Ops activate the window’s shutters and try to arrest RWBY. 
Your Fight Scene Sucks: 120
For the spinning discs. The fight starts, and Ruby opens with her semblance,
LuLaRwe: 39
just straight up speeding away. The rest of the Ace Ops take on WBY as Harriet catches up to Ruby, who tries and fails to convince her that this plan is wrong.
Yang makes headway against Elm, while Blake just swings around with that fucking ribbon, dodging Vine. Things get nasty when Elm gets Blake in a lock. 
Yang sparks Elm’s anger with a barb about ‘just following orders’ now, and Elm ditches Blake to try and take her on. Vine, in response, slingshots up to the ceiling for a better vantage point to launch his very own Nuck Pucks.
Back in the headmaster’s office, Weiss is taking on Marrow, and doing pretty well. After pelting Marrow with a hail of ice spikes, which he deflects with more spinning discs,
Your Fight Scene Sucks: 121
the fog clears and she reveals her faithful knight.
M: I know you Schnees are used to getting what you want, but it’s time to let this one go!
W: This is my home. I’m not giving it up without a fight.
We cut to one of the snowfields of Solitas, where the wreckage of the police caravan is burning. Qrow stumbles out, then goes to the aid of an unconscious Robyn. Clover, in one piece, arrives and says that if Qrow surrenders now, Robyn can get the medical help she needs. Qrow calls him manipulative, and they fight.
Clover seems not to want to fight, (“We don’t have to fight, friend”) which I’m going to take to be another whack upside the head for daring to think this might be gay. Qrow is dead set on resisting, however, and Clover will not cease his arrest attempt.
Tyrian, still in the wrecked airship, resorts to breaking his own right hand at the thumb joint to slip out of his cuffs, and resets it himself. 
Qrow seems to have Clover handled, but Tyrian serves as a distraction, and Qrow takes him on as well.
How is Tyrian able to fight? He had his aura broken and then was in an airship crash that got pretty nasty. His thumb is undoubtedly in a lot of pain.
Ill Logic: 140
The three-way fight begins, and inbetween licks, Tyrian offers Qrow the choice to settle their score with Clover out of the way, which Qrow doesn’t respond to, but the two of them do attack Clover at the same time. So, yeah, Qrow's essentially teaming up with the crazed serial killer against his best-friend-boyfriend.
*furious and getting angrier*
Why can’t we ever get scythe choreo with Ruby like we do with Qrow? I mean, Qrow’s isn’t exactly ideal—it’s never allowed to hit anything because a blade like that would finish the fight too quickly—but at least he gets to actually swing it around.
Back in Atlas Academy’s halls, the fighting continues.
Ruby and Harriet bolt into the headmaster’s office, and RW look at each other in assurance that the Ace Ops’ divided and agitated state won’t win, as Harriet and Marrow start to argue. Weiss swipes over their heads with her knight’s blade to get their attention—and when Harriet looks at her, Ruby has already sped past again, ready to lead her on another chase. 
Blake’s and Yang’s fight with Elm and Vine is not going nearly so well for the heroes, mostly because Blake is getting the crap beat out of her. What was that about meshing battle styles, now?
Vine grabs chunks of rock out of the wall, and Blake and Yang redouble their efforts. 
Their success hinges on Yang’s explosive glue shells, which she applies to a rock Vine throws—Blake, leaping high, kicks the rock back towards Vine, who shatters it and grabs her—and the glue bombs she took from the rock. ‘She’ is also a shadow clone that vanishes, leaving him holding the explosives as they detonate. Yang launches herself upward, grabs his bolas cuffs off of him, and binds him with them, slamming him into the floor just hard enough to break his aura.
So yeah, Yang's still doing most of the work and Blake's still doing ribbon nonsense, but marginally better.
Vine’s defeat noticeably fractures the other Ace Ops. Guitar starts up and lyrics kick in as the fight continues.
Weiss is proving particularly hard for Marrow to counter—he tries using his paralyzing “Stay” command on Weiss, but this doesn’t stop her control of the knight, and vice versa. He quickly falls.
I think I mentioned this before, but Weiss' excellent performance in this fight--winning handily, as she should--is in fact a huge band-aid. See, you'll notice that while Ruby, Blake, and Yang all have trouble with their opponents before ultimately securing victory, Weiss never once slips up and takes out Marrow fairly easily. And she was always going to, regardless, because the fandom gave MKG hell in their fury over the dive she took for Jaune's power-up in Volume 5. There are still chunks missing from Miles Luna's ass where it got chewed off in 2017 over that. It's less noticeable but still there in Volume 6, wherein Weiss having her combat skills restored to normal doesn't get a huge focus because it happens in a giant mech fight where she runs a supporting role.
We're not giving this the point just yet, though (mostly because I don't feel like editing 20 recap posts' worth of point counts, but also because again, Weiss has every right to win a fight of this level). We'll give it to them when it starts to get really noticeable in Volume 8.
Harriet and Ruby are having a speed-blitzing fight, with each one holding the upper hand at different points, but Ruby surprises Harriet and binds her in her own cuffs. Elm, however, under the combined force of Blake and Yang, is the next to be defeated—her semblance’s ability to root her in place and make her un-stumble-able failing when Yang just breaks the floor. This is also the first time we've seen Yang use her semblance since Volume 6, and I have to say, the redesign it's been put through looks ten levels of fugly.
Harriet tries to make do with just her feet, and for a second this works, but Ruby’s not down yet. And before they can finish, Weiss places a barrier inbetween them. Harriet is so exhausted that smacking into it effectively takes her out.
Ruby calls to her teammates. They have to stop Ironwood from getting the relic, and Weiss says that means keeping him from the winter maiden. Yang says she and Blake will look for JNPR, but Ruby doesn’t want to split up, since their Atlesian scrolls don’t work. Enter these two:
Where the hell have you two been? How did you get up to Atlas? How are you going to help? Too late. Immediately after Pietro’s and Maria’s arrival is a scene cut.
JNR, searching for Oscar, appear to have found him. But then another Oscar runs out, screaming no, and punches the fake one out! Neo takes her first real hit of the entire damn series.
The real Oscar retrieves the lamp and says Neo attacked him. Neo gets her parasol out, ready to fight over the lamp. But then, another scene cut.
Winter, while all of this is happening, is…preparing to euthanize Fria, the winter maiden, and take her power. She has a tea set ready, and is murmuring that she hopes it will be painless. Penny questions this course of action, next to a stasis pod with Fria in it—are they going to use the aura-transfer machine again, like in Volume Three? And Winter, grappling with the morality of her orders, says that the maiden’s power and the relic must be kept out of Salem’s hands, even if it means Fria’s death.
A rumble comes from somewhere far off, and Winter gets her saber out. 
Cinder has arrived. And frankly, I was hoping for less panic and more fight from Winter.
Winter and Penny are each a force to be reckoned with unto themselves. It shouldn't really be a question of whether they can whoop Cinder, but how quickly they can beat Raven's record. Of course, there is still some drama available: Can they beat Cinder, and should they even try in Fria’s small, cramped hospice ward? Cinder threatens Penny and orders her to step aside, but Penny will have none of it. She gets her knives out, ready for battle.
While all of this is happening, Qrow and Tyrian and Clover are still having their dumb threeway out in the snow.
Clover is getting his ass kicked by Qrow feat. Tyrian, who have indeed teamed up in a violation of all possible sense from Qrow Branwen. Despite some good tricks up his sleeve, and successfully binding Tyrian again, Clover is knocked aura-less by Qrow.
Qrow rages at Clover, asking why he couldn’t just do the right thing instead of what he was told. Clover gets up, saying he trusts “James” with his life, and wanted to trust Qrow too, complete with tears in his eyes. 
And you know what? Fuck you. I’m no fool.
How To Piss Off Gay People: 41 (+5)
You jackasses know what you’re doing, you’ve been doing it all season.
Then Tyrian kills Clover.
Stabs him right through the back with Qrow’s sword. Whereupon more police ships finally begin arriving, so it can look like Qrow killed him.
How To Piss Off Gay People: 51 (+10)
Love To Be a Part of It Someday: 80 (+5)
Gay-baited and then gay-buried, is that how it is? You motherfuckers just pissed me off something fierce. This season was going so well, too.
After that performance with Ren and Nora arguing whether Bumbleby would be canon, I’m not going to sit here and debate whether we were supposed to take Clover and Qrow as having something possibly romantic—not with the winks, the lonesome bonding, the quips from Robyn, or the way Qrow screams “I’ll kill you!” at Tyrian. Not with how we get an art-deco shadow the same as when Adam dismembered Yang, who is apparently in love with Blake now.
LGBT RWBY fans have already called Eddy Rivas and co. on the backpedaling they did, trying to insist that oh no, it definitely wasn't supposed to be romantic! It just kind of looked that way because uhhhhh look over there! But what matters is that Rooster Teeth knew their LGBT fans were into this, wanted it, were happy to have it. You complete jackasses thought that you could get away with this after freely admitting that the last dude you thought about allowing to be gay had that gay snipped right out because he was going to die an episode later. With that in mind, no, I don’t care that Clover Ebi stopped just short of actually being a canon gay man. I care that Rooster Teeth teased the fuck out of that and then killed him. They knew exactly what was happening and encouraged it at every turn--and then turned around and did this.
*still getting angrier*
The defenses I've seen for this have amounted to some of the most jaw-dropping, mind-melting corporation bootlicking I've ever seen. No, no, see! Clover dies because he just trusts Ironwood too much, he can't not follow orders, he's too military!!!! It's all a big, #deep criticism against militarism!!!!!
*rapidly freezing over*
Let's start with the fact that they even wrote this garbage scenario in the first place, when by far the more logical thing to do would be to split up and let Qrow settle his score with Tyrian while Clover grabbed Robyn, who is unconscious, vulnerable, and bleeding out right now and got her to medical assistance. Militarism or not, there's no reason not to--the escapes serial killer and the wounded on-site should both be prioritized over Qrow, and would be even in real life.
From any standpoint, the checklist of things Clover has to ignore in order to justify continuing to attack Qrow at all, and the violations of sense on Qrow's part to team up with Tyrian--it's inexcusable, and no bleating about how it's some sort of social commentary on men dying for militaristic authoritarianism will make it okay.
Ill Logic: 150 (+10)
All so that you could kill the gaybait off and skip away into the bloody sunset.
You'd better believe this was the straw that broke the camel's back for RWBY's LGBT fanbase. They saw right through it and they were furious. Any remaining idea that RWBY was some sort of socially conscious ally show that loved their LGBT fans went right out the window. From this point on, the only people parroting that nonsense were Bumbleby fans. This complete shitshow also sets the stage for the crashing and burning (pun intended) of RWBY as a whole, which happens in Volume 8. But we're getting ahead of ourselves now.
Fuck this show. We’re ending the post here. I’m sick and tired of this shit and I don’t feel like recapping it anymore. The next time you see me, I’ll be wearing veneers and a veil—I’m going to go rip a few things apart with my teeth, and I don’t want the blood to show.
Counts:
- Jaune: 67
- It Was Right There: 52
- Fauxminism: 50
- Hypocrisy: 36
- Reliable Leaders: 40 + 15
- Prowling Wolf Fallacy: 17
- Prowling Wolf Fallacy: 17
- Threatening Enemies: 33
- Love to Be a Part of It Someday: 80
- Your Fight Scene Sucks: 121 + 33
- Evisceration Evasion: 34
- Evisceration Evasion: 34
- Ill Logic: 150
- Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Veil: 53 + 62
- Wink Wink, Nudge Nudge: 29
- Band-Aid Brigade: 33
- Wink Wink, Nudge Nudge: 29
- RSVP: 70
- Road to Nowhere: 25
- Y.A.S. Queen: 16
- Rooster Tease: 20
- LuLaRwe: 39
- The Lovegood Fallacy: 12
- How to Piss Off Gay People: 51
- Invisembl: 12
- Broke-Ass Clowns: 27
- Shut the Fuck Up: 7
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45 – Volume 7, Episodes 7, 8, 9, and 10 | Table of Contents | 47 – Volume 7 Finale
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Date: 2023-12-12 01:47 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2023-12-12 01:39 pm (UTC)From: