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RWBY Final Thoughts: Story | Table of Contents | RWBY Final Thoughts: Characters (Part II)
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Characterization was a major weak point of RWBY. You can tell after having been in the game as long as I have that Miles and Kerry just don’t have an equal amount of love for every character. They’re very protective of certain characters and very disdainful towards certain others, and it shows quite often.
Let’s look at the character-based counts for the RWBY spork:
- Jaune: 89
- Fauxminism: 69
- Hypocrisy: 57
- Love To Be a Part of It Someday: 106
- Y.A.S. Queen: 20
And of course, we already went over certain counts that could also be called character-focused back in the Story segment.
What concerns me is that we had not one, not two, but three characters I’d readily call Mary Sues, and another three I’d call Scary Sues, and all of them are men. The three characters that received the most leeway and sympathy from the hand of the author, to the point of breaking with the fandom, were Jaune, Qrow, and Ozpin.
Jaune was only the most obvious one, with everybody in the fandom agreeing from day one that Jaune was getting too much focus and making himself unsympathetic and this message somehow never sinking in with Miles, who never ceased trying to get the audience to sympathize with his manpain over various dead or injured women. Hypocrisy, of course, was Qrow’s bread and butter because the story was determined to hold him up as in the right even when it showed he was an impulsive, violent bully. This one didn’t sink in with the fandom, who matched the authors’ overzealous sympathetic casting with a scary fervor, and only critical-minded fans called Qrow for what he really was. Ozpin, however, was the most divisive, and I’ve seen few if any people really spot the workings that showed that Miles and Kerry were willing to protect him from all negative implications—even though the fandom had long been agreed since Volume 4 that he was shady and not as trustworthy as the story was setting him up to be.
When we look on Mary Sues, we look on a character that is overly idealized, whose faults are excused even as those of other characters’ are demonized, or even warping other characters entirely to suit a narrative that supports them.
Jaune is, again, obvious in this respect—you’re clearly supposed to feel sorry for him when something bad happens to him (or someone else that he can cry about), yet you’re not supposed to object when he behaves like an asshole, causing a severe split with the audience. Qrow was the same way—he was handed massive amounts of sympathy for his “cursed” semblance, but anyone else that remotely stepped out of line or disagreed with him was worthy of scorn. Ozpin was actually worse than Qrow on this front though, if we’re being honest. The determination to protect him from any scrutiny resulted in twisting valid complaints into stupid ones twice, with RWBY for some reason talking about free bird-shifting powers as if it was some gross violation, and Hazel accosting him for the death of his sister with entirely too much righteous anger for something that was obviously not his fault, but probably would’ve been more directly related to him in earlier drafts. Worst of all, the decision to try and explore Ozpin’s backstory as a teeth-gnashing, begrudging bone toss to the fandom resulted in one of the most heinous episodes of RWBY ever to see the screen, with Ozpin’s female opposite Salem ruthlessly demonized and faulted for catastrophic happenings that were legitimately not her fault, and Ozpin receiving no examination whatsoever for his horrific acts in that same episode, with his regime as a god over mankind excused because he felt bad about it later, and his hideous controlling of an innocent uninvolved man into sexual acts with Salem completely unmentioned.
It’s rare for any author, even a severely underperforming one, to accumulate more than one Mary Sue, and that says very bad things indeed about Miles and Kerry, most importantly that they had no self control and tended to skew characters more easily and with more frequency than the average Suethor.
And yet somehow, these two helmed a show that was held up with a reputation as a feminist story, a modern-day classic that didn’t end up becoming a “girl show ghetto”, wildly popular among all genders yet still undeniably focused on women. The Fauxminism count only ended up highlighting how hollow this reputation ultimately was, and the unfortunate fact that maybe we were fools to ever believe it. Feminism made no difference whatsoever in how characters were treated by the authors, except in exceedingly misogynistic displays.
Off the top of my head, I count the vastly different treatment villainous male characters received versus villainous female characters. Mercury suffered far worse treatment than Emerald ever has, and yet Mercury’s flaws are unexplored and he is allowed to remain a one-note villain, while Emerald is shoved into a co-dependent loyalty role and is allowed to join the heroes with much of her wrongdoing—some of it very heinous—swept under the rug, and for what? Tits, and that’s it.
Misogyny in writers like Miles and Kerry commonly manifests as an abundance of pity and excuses for female characters and often to their detriment as well as the story’s, skewing sympathetic narrative structure wildly in favor of women and essentially handling them with kid gloves on to the point their characters become less interesting for it. You can observe the same skewing of sympathy in abundant other contrasting pairs—Ironwood is a relentlessly evil dickbag while Harriet’s abrasiveness and attempt to blow up Mantle is brushed off as grieving for Clover. Ilia is redeemed while Adam is made as villainous as possible and killed for it, as is Fennec. The Curious Cat isn’t even a man, but by god, they didn’t have any luscious titties, so they get to be torn apart and eaten by monsters while Neo, despite technically undergoing death of personality, is effectively absolved by the story because she lost her man. Cinder’s backstory changed absolutely nothing about her current self and behavior, but god damn it, it still had to be shoved in so Miles could show that no woman could possibly choose evil without being puppy-kicked into it.
And, of course, by the time Volume 9 ended, Jaune had managed to warrant yet another pity party about how he was, of course, so badly affected by a woman dying—two, actually, given Penny’s and Alyx’s deaths both get used to try and engender sympathy for him, to the point it flat-out interrupts Ruby’s own breakdown scene.
Ironically, Y.A.S. Queen was the only character-related count to drop off, as characters began to worsen overall less due to misunderstanding the targeted archetype and more due to deliberate derailment and choices made on purpose to twist the story in certain directions. Suffice to say, I’d have much preferred a RWBY where Dragged Kicking and Screaming did not exist and Y.A.S. Queen took the hit instead.
With all of that said, let’s delve into the individual characters.
Main Cast
Ruby Rose
Color: Red
Referential Figure: Little Red Riding Hood
Representative Concept: “Purity”
Ruby Rose ostensibly was the central character of the whole show. She is the character who the show is named after, who the central team is named after, and whose portrait dominates the box art of all volumes. So why, time and time again, did it seem as if the writers had little idea of what to do with her, and even more frustratingly, little interest in finding any such thing?
I hesitate to cite Ruby as one of those characters I suspect to have gone through a few too many edits at Miles’ and Kerry’s hands, because Ruby’s primary flaw is one that stretches back towards the debut of the show. Quite a bit of initial fan apprehension towards Volume One was rooted in the Ruby (and Weiss) we got in the show not matching their seeming characters in the trailers. And what I can ultimately cite is that the Ruby we got in the Red Trailer is probably one I would’ve enjoyed more overall if she had stuck.
In the end, “purity” simply doesn’t work as a concept for Ruby to be built around. “Defiance”, “strength”, and whatever the hell one would call Blake’s word of choice all have directions you can take them and interesting things you can do with them. But “purity” is really just another word for “innocence”, and as I’ve already said, there’s only one thing you can really do with innocence: kill it. But even this doesn’t really work, because Ruby with her innocence broken isn’t something Miles and Kerry knew how to write—they only knew how to write the actual breaking part, and very badly at that.
The thing Ruby should’ve been from the very beginning was, if we’re being honest, something that was constantly denied to her: a badass. Even moreso than Yang, for whom bombastic and crunchy fights served her build-up as a powerhouse before tearing her down. Ruby shouldn’t have been the “smaller, more honest soul”, she should’ve been the shining light, an unstoppable badass that legitimately stood as a dangerous opponent that held the heroic faction secure against all attempts by the enemy to destroy them—like Goku, or Link, or any manner of iconic heroes. Logistically, there’s no reason for her not to be—she has a near-unbeatable combo of highly destructive weapon, good range, and high speed, lacking a lot of the weaknesses of other fighters. The parts of Ruby that should’ve received much more focus were her expertise at monster-slaying and the awe she inspired from her peers, something we saw maybe once with her Nevermore kill in Volume One.
This makes her one of the few characters whose primary error in characterization had as much to do with animation as it did with writing. Even if Miles and Kerry had wanted to write a badass, formidable Ruby with all the confidence and swagger that entailed, it never would’ve made it to screen because the truth is, Ruby’s fighting style is simply too demanding for Rooster Teeth, even before they switched to contract-only work and made their employee roster a revolving door. Even when Ruby fighting with her scythe actually showed up, it was treated more like a sword than anything, with a cling-clang strike-and-block approach that frequently made me wonder why Ruby appeared to be making all efforts to hit opponents with maybe the outer frame of the scythe if at all. Its cutting edge is on its inside, and that’s why you can’t really “block” a scythe the way you can a sword. I pointed this out in her fight with Neo in Volume 3, wherein Neo had no means of getting close or counter-attacking until Roman distracted her. Even the fight with the Curious Cat at the end of Volume 9, which for some reason was held up as a great show of Ruby’s fighting style by many others, suffered from this flaw.
Ruby should’ve been built up as someone who could stand up to the villains, so that her failures would be more impactful when they happened and would show an actual rising threat. But confrontations with the villains were rare, and frequently ended up with Ruby eating dirt to serve some other ultimate purpose—showing off Qrow’s badassery when Tyrian was in the picture, and setting up Jaune’s semblance when the Volume 5 climax occurred. Neo in Volumes 8 and 9 made embarrassing work of her despite me pointing out that, especially with her extra-special new training, Ruby should be more than a match for her.
It doesn’t seem like Monty had a lot planned for Ruby besides Summer Rose and whatever looming history was in store for that relationship, and Miles and Kerry wasted far too much time for viewers to remain invested in it as they once were. And worse, every attempt at a patch job for Ruby’s character was an abject failure.
Silver eyes, a sacred power meant to slay Grimm, was entirely the wrong choice when Ruby wasn’t really a character who needed help on that front. This revelation treated Ruby as someone whose edge was in a powerful mystical lineage rather than anything about her as a person or fighter. Worse still, with Salem being Grimm and Cinder being part-Grimm herself, it rendered the above situation even worse, because from then on Ruby officially couldn’t be allowed to be in the same room as Cinder at all, as otherwise the story would be pretty much over thanks to the “Cinder Fall Death Ray” Ruby had been given. By the time that power even got explored in the first place, it’s Volume 6, and Miles and Kerry had already been forced to walk back its importance because enemies Ruby actually needed to exert effort on wouldn’t be vulnerable to it, with Maria Calavera basically saying as much.
And the Ever After, and an exploration of Ruby’s trauma at that point? I still feel ill thinking about it. It was never going to be good, because with all that Ruby had been up to by that point, a mental breakdown was awkwardly timed. Those things are generally most appropriate after tragedies personally witnessed, yet Ruby never made it to Vacuo to see the disaster that she allowed to happen there, wasn’t in Solitas when Atlas fell, and didn’t get to see Penny die and had to be told about it by a third party. The most appropriate times for a mental breakdown on Ruby’s part would’ve been the aftermath of Volume 3 or early Volume 4, in which Ruby is having to deal with having seen two good friends of hers die horribly. Even though Ruby is shown to be traumatized by these events, her trauma is consistently skated over, and we covered that much.
And of course, the token attempts at involving Ruby more deeply in the story due to the practice of “Summer-baiting” only really revealed how Miles and Kerry still, after ten years, do not have that part of the plot figured out yet. Even if the vision shown to Ruby by the Blacksmith at the end of Volume 9 had occurred in early RWBY, it wouldn’t really change much. I was dumbfounded at the idea people in the fandom had that this actually changed Raven’s or Summer’s characters when it didn’t, and the big “revelation” that there was more to the story of Summer’s death isn’t that surprising since most people had guessed that there would be anyway, else it wouldn’t be interesting enough to actually include in the plot.
Ultimately, Ruby barely matters in her own story, with very little in the way of compelling characterization because all of her victories come about as a result of her silver eyes, which are essentially divine manifestation of heroic resolve to protect—and as Yahtzee Croshaw would tell you, the equivalent of a green tunic and a sword are not themselves compelling characterization.
Weiss Schnee
Color: White
Referential Figure: Snow White
Representative Concept: “Defiance”
Alone of the main characters, Weiss actually manages to remain interesting by far the longest. She still gets chucked in the bin by the time of the last volume, but it’s no surprise her fanbase remained strong up until the very end.
As I’ve stated before, the core concept of her character being “defiance” is largely to thank for this, because it’s so easy to write around. No matter how much you put her down, she’ll get back up, and come back stronger. For this reason, Weiss edges closest to the “hope punk” that RWBY fans often try and sell the show as.
Yes, there are fumbles here and there, most noticeably the overt racism she displays in Volume One that never really gets cast as wrong. If we’re being frank here, it’s probably for the best that that was left behind, given what tends to happen when Miles and Kerry actually try to fix their mistakes (i.e. make everything worse).
Quite often in early volumes, Weiss was subjected to the same embarrassing treatments as Ruby, in that she often struggled to win fights she should’ve won easily, most egregiously in Volume 5 where Vernal handily defeats her despite Weiss outmatching someone of her caliber in every way. There are still chunks missing from Miles Luna’s ass from when the RWBY fandom chewed it off over that, and he seems to have gotten the picture since, as Weiss never again takes a dive and manages to outperform her teammates even when the story is very clearly setting her up to fail, i.e. the fight with Cinder in Volume 8.
The key to the success of Weiss’ character was a certain level of restraint, emphasizing the doubts in her mind at the right moments and lending her a sense of emotional vulnerability that made it that much stronger when she rose to the challenge. The tangled web her family became as Weiss was updated from only child to youngest child to middle child actually ended up benefiting her character, as it provided extra angles to examine Weiss from and new dynamics to shape her with.
Like many RWBY characters, her best volume was Volume 7, which took her back to her home nation of Atlas and allowed the conflict with her father to shine. It’s only right that she was the one to ultimately arrest him, even if the work on that part was done more by her mother than anything.
Of course, Volume 8 sends her off the cliff with everyone else, and as a result we know there was never any chance of Weiss finishing the series the way she was meant to. Her defeat of Jacques was not complete until the Schnee family as a whole could be rid of him and the SDC’s name could be cured of the reputation his business practices had earned it. Once that whole plot crashed into so much rubble with Atlas because Miles Luna is the pettiest writer ever, then it was a plot permanently fucked over.
From there on, Weiss was relegated to comic relief (which she was very poor at) and making eyes at Jaune, which is something every fan of Weiss is no doubt lamenting given the independence and appeal of her character prior.
Blake Belladonna
Color: Black
Referential Figure: Belle (Beauty & the Beast)
Representative Concept: ???
Blake Belladonna is probably the RWBY character who lost the most overall, going from probably the most popular character of early volumes to one of the most disliked in the eyes of fans. And what’s the reason for that? Say it with me now, everyone:
RACISM.
This character was uniquely and strongly tied to an in-universe racial rights allegory and as such, was always going to suffer the most when in the hands of racists. I am more than willing to tell it like it is when it comes to the way Miles Luna and Kerry Shawcross handled her: they were racists and that’s why her character tanked.
Racism is why Adam was warped into a deranged, murderous ex-boyfriend and arguable groomer if Barbara Dunkelman’s nonsense is to be believed, because they wanted what he represented (the extremes oppressed minorities will go to when crushed by an oppressive system over and over) invalidated and removed from the picture. I absolutely refuse to believe Monty had a part in that, for reasons I’ve detailed before.
As a result, Blake suffered, being turned from ethical criminal activist to abused ex-girlfriend, and her narrative being twisted from a struggle against racism to a struggle against alleged misogyny as Blake’s terror of Adam was used to entrench RWBY’s reputation as a feminist fantasy, splitting the fanbase. Protective fans were all too happy to do the work for Rooster Teeth, positing that criticizing the destruction of Blake’s anti-racism arc was, itself, misogynist due to therefore being a complaint against her struggle to rise against a male abuser. Rooster Teeth were not the first to try and use feminism as a shield against examinations of racism, and they weren’t the last.
But RWBY’s once-massive fanbase weren’t entirely composed of fools, and many saw this for what it was. Blake’s character was the first one Miles and Kerry were willing to go at with bats and crowbars, because following through on the things Blake had to say about racism would’ve required more self-awareness on their parts as white writers who, in the end, were unwilling to accept that racism, particularly in America, was still an issue of any kind.
Of course, depicting a woman’s struggle with an abusive boyfriend was also outside their skillset. Not only is it abundantly obvious that there was no plan for Blake as an abuse survivor by the time this was written in on the fly, but I sincerely doubt Miles Luna, famed speaker of slurs and basic dudebro straight man fascinated by female bisexuality for how hot he finds it, would’ve been very good at it even if there had been an attempt to explore it. They knew all that they really needed was Blake emerging triumphant, so there wasn’t much incentive on their part to actually explore the damage Blake would’ve exhibited from an abusive relationship—especially since, being the type of writers they are, it doesn’t seem like Miles or Kerry view anything short of physical assault to be abuse. Even though they had Blake essentially say out loud that Adam would gaslight and emotionally manipulate her, I doubt she would’ve said that if Adam hadn’t already been written villainously enough to try to kill her in the first place, which made it safe for them to write her saying it without thinking about how someone doesn’t necessarily need to be a murderer to emotionally abuse others.
And of course, once Adam is out of the picture, Blake is officially cleared of all plots. No more explorations of racism or her status as an oppressed minority, nor any need to explore what her relationship was like now that she’s the triumphant survivor. You can tell this was on purpose, because Blake in Atlas itself was a scenario ripe with potential for exploring environments full of entrenched racism, but all we get is a token racist dude that Weiss launches into a dumpster and that’s it.
Of course, what few fans of RWBY remained at this point really didn’t care. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: Blake doesn’t really have any fans among Bumbleby fans. Bumbleby fans only really care about Yang and Yang’s girlfriend, and Blake can be anyone or no one at all provided she gets to fulfill that role for them. “No one” was definitely the option we ended up with, since Miles and Kerry knew full well that exploring Blake’s character simply wasn’t necessary to please people that alleged to like her—their only mistake was assuming that crowd of people would be enough to secure their finances.
We can still mourn her, of course, for what we lost—an interesting and compelling character, a vicious yet graceful rebel and activist, not to mention a wonderful dynamic with Sun Wukong that was tossed out in favor of gaybait, but we’ll get to that later.
Many people still watching RWBY to the end disliked Blake, primarily for being a waste of space and at times rather annoying. It’s difficult to argue with them, because with her character having no real goals specific to her that she spends time pursuing, and basically being relegated to Yang’s arm candy, only ever served to remind people of how far RWBY had fallen as a show.
Yang Xiao Long
Color: Yellow
Referential Figure: Goldilocks
Representative Concept: Strength
Yang Xiao Long was a character that seemed to be building up to an impressive peak for much of the story. Sure, she had a slow start with Volume One allowing her to linger on the fringes of the main cast while Jaune dealt with bullying issues and Blake wrangled a man. But looking at how far she’s fallen, it’s difficult to conceptualize her once being tied with Weiss for having the most fans still invested in her character.
Yang had two primary issues that fueled her character, and unfortunately they both fizzled by the end of Volume 6 even though only one of them really had any right doing so. The first was her bright but aggressive personality, with her approaches to most struggles being to simply bulldoze her way through it, and this negatively affecting her fighting style to the point the consequences of her confrontation with Adam were only shocking because of the severity rather than the outcome. The second of course was her abandonment issues fueled from not knowing why her birth mother left the family.
What I don’t see a lot of people acknowledge is that Raven is essentially the villain of Yang’s story in much the same way as Jacques is the villain of Weiss’. Yeah, Raven’s not a soulless bastard billionaire like Jacques is, but she is at the root of Yang’s confidence issues and her worldview clashes harshly with her daughter’s. Weiss arresting her father was a victory, but not the end of her conflict with him, or at least it shouldn’t have been. Similarly, Yang may have achieved a moral victory over Raven at the end of Volume Five, but this should’ve served a deeper extended conflict between the two rather than wrapping it up in its entirety.
Raven is a heartless, self-serving asshole, guys. That’s her character. I’ve gone to many pains to emphasize how Raven, if she were the man and Taiyang were the woman, would not receive nearly the efforts to humanize and sympathize with her that the show and fandom alike shower on her. But at the end of the day, the story makes the point that she had a life with Taiyang and had Yang, and left of her own accord with no apparent reasons behind her actions besides simply not feeling like staying, something only reinforced by her oft-misunderstood conversation with Summer in the Volume 9 flashback, in which she basically says “eh, not my scene”. Taiyang openly says Raven’s flaws tore their family apart, and despite bizarre insistence by some members of the fandom that Taiyang is obviously a jerk and the worst parent ever, we see no evidence in-story that he was wrong to say this.
And Yang deserved better. She deserved better than a parent who walked out rather than make it work and left her damaged as a result, and she deserved a deeper storyline beyond simply shaming her for that. Raven’s cowardice and desire for strength, combined with her cunning and aptitude for scheming and misdirection on the fly, could’ve made her a worthy adversary for someone as prideful and straightforward as Yang. There could’ve been devil-on-my-shoulder attempts to sway her into joining Raven, with a worsening situation making it difficult to say no, and Raven’s tactics around her causing her to go on the warpath.
But no. Instead, Raven sheds tears of shame, and the next time we see her six or seven years later, everything’s chill because why shouldn’t it be?
And that only leaves Yang with her shattered confidence after facing Adam, something her abandonment issues were kind of haphazardly welded onto via tension with Blake over that occurrence, something I railed against for being stupid even before it became essentially the first step in a long road full of gaybait.
I don’t necessarily dislike the idea of Yang losing her arm and thus her straightforward and confident persona, and receiving a metal arm signifying her rebuilding herself. I just question if it was necessary. We barely got anything at all of Yang before her dramatic fall from grace into traumatized depression, and the whole thing was wrapped up far too quickly. All of the moving parts in that equation were begging for more screentime, but just like so much else with RWBY, it ends up very one-and-done. As with Blake, both of Yang’s potential plots, both her larger and more-involved one with Raven and her subplot with Adam, are closed for good in Volumes 5 and 6, respectively.
And then what does that leave? Well, nothing.
Yang ended up sharing a character slot with Blake by the time of Volume 7, because both were equally empty and essentially were made into Rooster Teeth’s fishing line to bait more money out of shippers. While Blake seemingly lost all memories of what was pretty implicitly her love interest beforehand to make room for this, the chop was much less clean on Yang’s end, as her sudden abundance of concern for Blake out of nowhere ended up causing frustration with fans, because it often came at the expense of one of Yang’s established characteristics, that being her intense love and protectiveness towards Ruby.
Yang and Ruby are each other’s first priority. They even have a song, “Gold”, all about Yang’s sisterly love and how she wants to make Ruby’s life better. Trying to make Blake a huge part of Yang’s headspace would’ve been awkward anyway since she never had been before The IncidentTM, but it was especially messy with how it often made her look like she was blatantly ignoring Ruby because she had a girlfriend now.
Of course, there’s not much I can say about the Bumbleby relationship that I haven’t said already. It’s incredibly obvious that Barbara Dunkelman and her cronies at Rooster Teeth are lying their asses off about how Bumbleby was planned from the beginning, and I know that because I lived through early RWBY and its fandom and I’d be happy to tell you the more likely scenario is that Barb regrets ever having to play ball with these people to make money in the first place, given how hideously the shippers have historically behaved about it. The canonization of Bumbleby occurring only at the end of a very long line of bait and only when Rooster Teeth literally could not stay afloat without it is, of course, a disgustingly transparent manipulation. This company blatantly took advantage of their gay audience. There is nothing morally upright about the way this ship was handled and I will forever resent knowing that Rooster Teeth have contempt for people like me and used me and my community for a quick buck.
But even then, if you took all that context away, Blake’s and Yang’s relationship still isn’t very good. In fact, it’s kind of boring. Supposedly what brings them together is their struggle against Adam, and yet he never comes up when the time for the kiss comes, and the stated features that attract Yang and Blake to one another were so baffling to me that I was left scrambling my head as to when the two had ever displayed any of them—and left wondering, in fact, if the ship-happy animators like Arryn Troche were actually allowed to write it, because it came off as fanon projections made canon.
Neither Blake nor Yang were interesting, is the major problem. Once their subplots were over, they were just filling empty space and not doing anything within it. And unfortunately, a boring and uninteresting character plus another boring and uninteresting character just makes for a boring and uninteresting relationship. And extra unfortunately, fans’ attempts to make me believe otherwise largely failed.
I hate to break this to you guys, but Yang isn’t butch. She doesn’t have abs or muscles. And she and Blake don’t have chemistry. Hell, they don’t even foil each other now that they’re basically the same person with the same personality and no conflicting elements or desires. For all that Yang may have a large fanbase dedicated to projecting all sorts of interesting qualities onto her, the truth of what RWBY shows us is that she’s just...dull.
Which is a travesty to say about a character who was described as a brilliant golden spark defying attempts to symmetrically categorize her.
Jaune Arc
Color: Yellow
Referential Figure: Jeanne d’Arc
To say this character is divisive would be…
Well, dishonest.
Blake was a divisive character. Ruby has been a divisive character on occasion. Hell, Qrow and Raven are divisive characters sometimes. But Jaune? There is nothing divisive about Jaune because he has been wildly unpopular since the first volume of RWBY, and there is exactly one reason why: he is Miles Luna’s pet.
There was just no getting around it, and nothing Miles Luna could ever say would successfully argue against this diagnosis, because the one thing Miles was just never able to do was let Jaune be out of the spotlight. It didn’t matter how inappropriate the timing or how forced the conflict or which character had to come off worse for it, the story was always bending into a pretzel to somehow be about Jaune.
We knew by Volumes 4 and 5 that this lesson hadn’t sunk in, and by the time Miles did that stupid AMA on Reddit where Kerry lied his ass off about him and Monty being the one to write Jaune scenes into the plot, I knew it never would. Sure enough, Volumes 6, 8, and 9 all managed to twist scenarios to be about Jaune, to the point of distraction.
Jaune was initially presented as this underdog type audience surrogate character, with whom we’re supposed to feel sympathy as he finds himself in this world far more challenging than he was ready for and thrust into a crowd of titans and heroes. This initial presentation backfired severely, as Jaune’s lack of preparedness came off jarring and was eventually be revealed to be due to lying his way into Beacon, immediately turning the audience against him, especially as it came in the midst of Jaune getting his very own arc about overcoming bullying.
Even if the first volume hadn’t been a major fumble, I believe that Jaune would’ve become an irritation to the audience either way, because Jaune’s role in the story required him to be weaker and more comedic, a dorky loser the universe seems to enjoy poking with a stick, and I strongly believe Miles Luna did not want to write that.
My main evidences for this are the way the story treats other characters, particularly male characters, and how this contrasts against how the story treats Jaune.
Neptune strikes me as the example we need to talk about first, because to this day I still see fans referring to him as “Jaune in a blue wig”. Look at everything Jaune has done in the story—bullying other characters, getting other characters injured and killed with his incompetence and taking up valuable screentime that should’ve been spent on others—and ask yourself if that’s fair. Now look at what Neptune and Jaune actually were in Volume 2, and ask if it’s fair even then. Jaune continually paws at a girl who doesn’t want his time and won’t take ‘no’ for an answer, while Neptune’s only crime appears to be flirting with a girl but not wanting to go to a dance with her. Yet Neptune is cast as an asshole for this, and Jaune gets to gracefully play matchmaker and be the bigger person—even though Miles Luna had to have already been finding ways to write Neptune out of the show entirely by that point.
Another example of contrasting treatment is Oscar. Oscar, by all rights, has been dealt a far worse hand than Jaune. Like Jaune, he has no knowledge of combat or the world he’s been thrust into, and unlike Jaune, he didn’t want to in the first place. He didn’t even have a weapon when a voice in his head started telling him he needed to go on a heroic journey. Rather than anyone express overt sympathy for his case, however, they all just treat it as a quirk rather than an extremely concerning transgression of his personal agency, to the point Jaune physically assaults him in an angry outburst—which of course, no one holds against him—over Ozpin’s stupidity. Or of course, that time Qrow punches him into a tree because he’s mad at Ozpin. I guarantee you if it had been Jaune that got punched, there would’ve been an extended scene of him receiving an apology, because Jaune is repeatedly coddled by the narrative while Oscar just gets left out to dry and is expected to adapt to his frightening situation without all the help Jaune got.
But of course, the biggest indicator, the factor that tells me Miles Luna strongly resented writing or at least having to voice a dorky loser at all, is the treatment of Sun Wukong. Sun is everything Jaune isn’t—he’s cool, he’s fun, he attracts women fairly easily, and he has no trouble holding his own in a fight. As much effort as Miles clearly put into trying to make Jaune someone the audience would love even if by force, I find it difficult to believe he’s incapable of trying equally as hard to downplay and deter and eventually excise entirely a character he feels is being more positively received. The entire time Sun was onscreen, what little screentime he did manage to obtain felt downright resentful, especially in Volume 4 where Blake is borderline abusive to him. This is of course in sharp contrast to how Jaune is never treated with anything but love by surrounding castmates no matter how great his infractions. I’m imagining that Sun was a target of a lot of Miles’ resentment, and that when Neptune walked into the show in Volume 2 and immediately swept Weiss off her feet, this was the last straw.
In short, the way Miles writes Jaune (and by extension other characters) strongly implies he does not want to write the dorky underdog, and this may have been why he thereafter pushed so hard for the tragic hero angle amidst other “strategist” and “heart” elements.
I’ve pointed out before that Jaune has no business being hyped up as a “strategist” when this was initially Ruby’s role and rightfully so. Ruby herself was shoved into the role of the Heart, which is where she got her tiresome habit of making long-winded heroic speeches, and as I already detailed above, these didn’t suit her, but she got stuck with them because Miles Luna picked the role he valued more (as an actually useful team member) for Jaune. But while Ruby may have been the Heart on paper, she doesn’t get to be the emotional core of the heroic faction, a role which again goes to Jaune.
When Jaune loses Pyrrha, Ruby is denied a satisfying emotional purge of that trauma while Jaune gets multiple extended displays of his grief over her. But this was simply not enough for Miles, who believed that the inevitable reveal of Jaune’s semblance needed some emotional fuel behind it, and rather than spend time thinking of how to work this in organically, he decided to make Weiss take a dive so Jaune could save her—a universally reviled move whose reception is one Miles is surely still bitter over to this day. And yet, this still was not enough—the message did not sink in. Despite it being abundantly obvious that the only solution for Jaune’s reputation among fans was to stop shoving him in, this pattern continued. Despite how furious the fanbase was that another character had been hurt to make room for Jaune’s angst, Miles pulled the same trick again with Oscar, with Jaune assaulting him so that he’d run away and a guilty Jaune could go meet Pyrrha’s mother and effectively be absolved of all wrongdoing since Pyrrha’s death by the story. Miles evidently did not account for a) the fanbase not being dumb enough to fall for this or b) Jaune’s harassment of Oscar overshadowing it, and in fact looking worse than the Weiss example because this time Jaune was just behaving like a bully.
When stranded in the Solitas snowfields in Volume 8, the tension between him and Yang and Ren rises as Ren’s mood has degraded due to a pileup of recent events going south, yet when Ren finally snaps at Jaune, over something that was undoubtedly not nearly relevant at the time but still nonetheless managed to again prove Miles Luna’s pettiness, it’s Ren’s problem and all the focus is on how Jaune didn’t deserve it. Of special interest to me is Penny’s second death—and even the leadup to it. Naturally, all of the heroes working together can’t restrain a hacked Penny attempting to fly off, until Jaune boosts her aura because this somehow helps her overcome the hack. Thank god he’s here! And while Penny may have died a second time purely because Miles wanted Winter Schnee to be the winter maiden, it does not escape me that the one ultimately charged with killing her to pass on the power is, of course, Jaune. It would still be fucked up no matter who Penny was asking to kill her, but obviously there’s no emotional gravitas because Jaune and Penny barely know each other. The person who always mattered most to Penny was always Ruby, from the very beginning. A plot point like that can’t make for any good drama, can’t capitalize on any dynamics, without Ruby. But why bother, when they can have Jaune stab a well-beloved character to death instead and be sad about it later?
And, of course, Volume 9, in which Jaune was so unnecessary that he sticks out like a sore thumb even in a volume that as a whole was completely pointless. Fans expecting Miles and Kerry to break the mold and finally focus all of their attention on Ruby Rose were going to be let down from the beginning, and sure enough when Ruby has her big moment to finally snap at everything that’s happened to her, it has to be cut short because of Jaune and his feelings. As if that nonsense weren’t enough, historical character Alyx’s whole purpose in the story appears to be solely to give Jaune another dead girl he can wangst over, never properly characterizing her but making sure everyone knows how much her betrayal and death hurt Jaune.
It’s disgusting. When Jaune’s approach to battle is to senselessly charge at enemies and attack, he gets special training. When that’s how Yang does it, she gets her arm cut off. You just know that Jaune, no matter how much we were supposed to pity him, would never spend ten minutes of screentime getting the shit beaten out of him by a villain the way Neo did to Ruby.
At every turn, even as Miles practically begged through the screen for people to stop calling Jaune a self-insert, he still time and again proved himself to be far too invested in him and unwilling to dial it back. Jaune’s fate as a universally disliked character was inevitable, because as far as Miles was concerned, RWBY was the Jaune Show feat. RWBY, and he blew every last chance to prove otherwise.
Pyrrha Nikos
Color: Red
Referential Figure: Achilles
Pyrrha barely feels like she should even be here, with how the story has left her so far behind, but at the end of the day she was a pretty important character for the first three volumes.
For all that she’s supposedly a late and great hero in-story, Pyrrha never actually does anything worth immortalizing. I’ve pointed out again and again how her seeming self-sacrificing last stand against Cinder didn’t help anyone or anything. It would be a different story if Pyrrha had, at any point, actually saved anyone and anyone in the present day could say with any legitimacy that they owed their lives or health to Pyrrha. But no one can.
In the end, we all know where this character slot is going to end up: Jaune. That’s who she lived and died for, and while she was alive, he was her only focus. For all that she’s glamorized post-mortem, no one else has all that much to do with her, and she doesn’t even really talk to her teammates Ren or Nora, nor Ruby, who witnessed her death. All of her time was reserved for melodrama with Jaune, and despite missing most of its marks and doing a lot more telling than showing, we were obviously supposed to believe these two were star-crossed lovers. Like everything in the first three seasons, Pyrrha and her alleged wonderful relationship-that-couldn’t-be with Jaune was more just going through the motions, walking us through what we were supposed to feel without giving us a lot of reasons to feel it.
Pyrrha’s memory survives primarily through Jaune, and even then only through the first five volumes. She does get talked about in the sixth, but it will be at that point that the story of RWBY generally drops Pyrrha for good, and it’s obvious why: she had served her purpose, and proved unable to sway fans into liking Jaune, so there was no reason to keep bringing her up.
What I do feel needs to be said that we probably don’t say enough is that orbiting Jaune as she did does not necessarily make Pyrrha the better half of the OTP-that-wasn’t. I’ve always noticed a double standard in satellite love interest ships, wherein the guy seems to be the major target of ire regardless of whether he’s the satellite or the planet being orbited. You don’t even have to exit RWBY territory to find an example—Sun and Blake, by Volume 5, had largely become Blake and The Man Circling Her, with all of Sun’s time and energy devoted solely to her and no effort whatsoever given to characterizing Sun outside of her. Yet while people seem more than willing to turn against Jaune for costing Pyrrha a character of her own outside himself, everyone noticeably hesitates to accuse Blake of being the same detriment to Sun’s character. And likewise, Sun receives a rather unfair brunt of disdain for not being more of a character, while Pyrrha tends to skate by on that front.
The sad truth is that, while we can blame Jaune all we want, it’s not like Pyrrha was a shining wellspring of characterization and potential that was unfairly saddled with the undeserving, soul-sucking vortex of male ego that is Jaune Arc. And perhaps this is why I simply was never so enamored of Pyrrha as my peers have been; she just isn’t giving much. She fares better than feminine satellites in other franchises by at least not being an embarrassment on the battlefield and thus not attracting dudebro internet comments about being “useless”, but at the end of the day, she’s still fairly bland. I see the vision, I just didn't see it come to fruition. At best, we can say that being saddled with Jaune deprived Pyrrha, like Sun, of the chance to grow into something greater.
Which does admittedly suck.
Lie Ren
Color: Green
Referential Figure: Hua Mulan
Lie Ren, the quiet dude Monty deemed his voice more suited towards than the alleged big good, Ozpin.
Although for most of the story he’s been forced to share a slot with Nora Valkyrie, we must ask ourselves if that would be fair of us now that RWBY is behind us and he’ll never have another chance at individual examination.
Lie Ren has the dishonor of being a character so flat and un-characterized overall that, by the time the fourth volume came along, it was apparently decided he needed his own arc delving into his backstory. I commented at the time that this was smart, but ultimately limited in how much it could fix—while it would help make Ren more interesting, it didn’t actually add much to his character to be discussed and failed to tie him to the larger plot. As a result, in Volumes 5 and 6, he’s back to being in the paper cut-outs bin with Nora.
Thankfully in Volume 7, an extra stab is made, more subtle than the prior overhaul that essentially made Volume 4 into Ren’s Storytime, but still good overall. In this case, someone (Kiersi being my typical guess by now) finally realized that Ren and Nora being traumatized and having important history wasn’t enough on its own, but rather that they needed to actually be distinct from one another. Ren and Nora had already been created as foils in the vein of Chie and Yukiko, with one bright and bubbly and loud and the other quiet and reserved, with color schemes to match. However, the anemic personalities they had kept them from capitalizing on it until that late in the game.
Personally, I think the growing division between Ren and Nora as Volume 7 continues was an excellent move. Ren is pessimistic and dislikes moving forward without guarantees, and puts his trust in the guy who seems to have a solid plan and a structure in place, that being Ironwood. Nora, meanwhile, thinks purely with her heart and will not accept innocent people being allowed to suffer even if for the greater good of them all. I think a little more could’ve been done with it, but it’s more inspired than what we got before.
Of course, this ultimately doesn’t save Ren from being a character that I never became greatly invested in. Miles’ and Kerry’s ideas of what Ren should be tend to boil down to “the guy in-tune with the plot who says wise stuff” and to this end he spends half his post-Volume 3 screentime being used as a mouthpiece, up to and including being given emotion-sensing powers pretty much out of nowhere when that was never how his semblance worked, purely so he can tell the viewer how everyone is feeling.
Much like Ruby, Ren’s ultimate problem stemmed from Miles and Kerry not really knowing who he should be and trying to divine who that person would be by looking at what they already had, which just wasn’t enough, and they weren’t creative enough to make up the difference.
Personally, to try and give him some more engaging traits, I would’ve tried to carry Ren’s childhood trauma into more tangible habits and behaviors for his present day self. Make him someone really into Grimm-ology, someone the team turns to when they need some info on unusual Grimm behaviors, because Ren’s childhood was destroyed by a Grimm of unusual intelligence. If he so cherishes what little family he has left after losing his parents, give him a protective streak. Just, anything more than what we got.
Nora Valkyrie
Color: Pink
Referential Figure: Thor
Nora was Ren’s equal and opposite, passionate and excitable and deeply emotional. And yet, she has the ignominy to have been drafted into a subplot about not knowing who she is...eight seasons in.
Ironically, Nora probably has it slightly worse than Ren despite it being Ren who the story initially described as traumatized by his past. While Ren lost his parents to a Grimm attack, Nora’s mother just ran from the Grimm and left her defenseless child for the monsters to kill. This is information only revealed at the end of Volume 8, of course, and much like with the arrival of Ren’s history with her in Volume 4, this revelation comes with absolutely no prior elements that would really foreshadow it.
It also doesn’t really fix the core problem Nora went into—that she doesn’t fill much of a niche on her own, despite some progress in Volume 7, and that most of her personality comes from bouncing off of Ren. At the beginning of Volume 8, Nora doesn’t know who she is, and by the end of Volume 8 (and Volume 9, and the show as a whole…) she still doesn’t know. What’s especially bizarre about this focus on who Nora is is that it doesn’t seem to affect people like Yang or Ruby, who could be described in similar “be strong and hit stuff” and “cracks dumb jokes” terms. The difference being, of course, that Yang and Ruby had subplots of their own that were tied to the larger story, while Nora never did.
As with Ren, Volume 7’s attempt to make her distinct by having her relate more to the plight of Mantle than to Ironwood’s strict control works out well, but as with the Volume 4 subplot, once that’s over, it’s done and she’s back to square one.
Honestly, sending Nora off on her own for a bit—as in, actually alone, rather than simply split off from Ren—might’ve been my go-to for exploring her more in depth. Nora’s highly independent as a combatant, as she should be—she’s fast and hits hard and doesn’t seem unable to take hits. Physically, Nora is much less dependent on Ren than Ren is on her. Emotionally, however, she obviously requires him to be around or she becomes unsure, and the reason for that is abundantly clear: Ren has been her rock since day one when the Nuckelavee attacked. I would’ve liked to see Nora’s vulnerable side when people need to depend on her emotionally, because even within her little group in Volume 8, no one needs to. Maybe send her out with only Penny for company, because Penny’s really great for bringing out the best in people.
Oscar Pine
Color: Green
Referential Figure: The Little Prince, and (allegedly) Tippetarius, aka Princess Ozma
Oscar was a character who should not have existed. I have made that point many times throughout the recaps, and the core problem of him was just never going to go away.
Much like Pyrrha and Sun, Oscar is burdened by his attachment to another, obviously more important character (Jaune, Blake, and in this case Ozpin). But the difference is that while Pyrrha or Sun could theoretically have been fixed by allowing them to have some focus outside the characters they orbited, such a solution wouldn’t be possible for Oscar even if Miles and Kerry had wanted to. Every attempt to characterize Oscar was completely futile, because his fate was decided the second he was conceptualized, not as his own character but as a vehicle to move Ozpin back into the story after dying.
None of his aspirations or desires meant anything, because realistically he could only have those if they aligned with Ozpin’s designs, both in-story and from a writing standpoint. If Oscar had actually loved his prior life and desired to be the best corn farmer ever, that would’ve put him at odds with Ozpin, and we can’t have that. Much like with Penny, any effort to try and respect Oscar’s choices was fake on Miles’ and Kerry’s parts, because Oscar was never going to be written as making a choice inconvenient to their favored party.
And this never stopped being an issue. Ozpin’s repeated refusal to honor Oscar’s consent put Miles and Kerry at major odds with the fanbase, because they didn’t see this as an issue, while the RWBY fanbase rightfully did. In any other series, Ozpin’s parasitic presence in Oscar’s body and mind would’ve been a massive subplot with Ozpin rightfully cast as an antagonist and all efforts made to remove him ASAP, and in RWBY that route was available via the aura-transfer machine Ironwood had built, but of course it was never used.
Watching the Oscar Debacle in action is a messy, uncomfortable feeling—it’s the epitome of forcing the issue, because Ozpin mattered to Miles and Kerry and Oscar simply didn’t.
Ozma, aka Ozpin
Color: Green
Referential Figure: Oz the Great and Powerful, the Wizard of Oz
Ozpin is a frustrating character to talk about because if you were to look at what seemingly-critical fans of RWBY have to say nowadays, you’d see a lot of them acting like Ozpin is unfairly treated by the narrative, and that he was “abused” by Salem and that nobody supports him because he’s a man. That’s because all the sane critical fans left ages ago, and what we’ve been left with is a bunch of simple, contrarian idiots who think that RWBY as a show has something against men. I apologize on behalf of anyone who’s had to witness this.
The irony is that this puts them on the same side as RWBY stans, who suffer from even more brainrot and unironically believe him to be heroic and upright and deserving of praise. Again, what we’re looking at now is what’s left after all the sane fans packed it up and split.
As I said before, Ozpin is a plain ol’ Mary Sue, and you can observe much of the same patterns in him as you can in Jaune. He had a satellite, had a Scary Sue, entirely too much of the story revolved around him and his history, and all decisions he made were either morally upright or understandable failings. The warning signs were there fairly early on, with attempts to paint Ozpin as smarter than his peers or unfairly treated by his opponents largely falling flat and making him come off as a buffoon or immature. Every time Ozpin clashed with Ironwood, it was Ozpin who looked worse despite the opposite intended effect.
But once he “died” and Volume 4 came along, everything just got so much worse. Ozpin binding to an entirely new character and inevitably becoming the sole owner of their body was quite possibly the worst direction they could’ve taken him, as his leadership was tainted with the fact that he had to wear Oscar as a meat suit. Raven’s issues with him were set up as a mark against her, and topped off by giving her the most bizarre reason to hate him ever, which was free bird powers. Similarly, Hazel was also given a completely dumb reason to hate him, and slowly it became obvious that Ozpin was being shielded from scrutiny.
But the divide between writers and audience grew, and eventually forced drastic measures. The Volume 6 episode “The Lost Fable” really does reek of frustration on the part of Miles and Kerry. The more the episode tried to make Salem out to be this terrible bitch who deserved to be hated, the more it skated across Ozpin’s own terrible acts in the same breath. It seemed as though Miles and Kerry, angry that they couldn’t force the fanbase to trust Ozpin, decided that at least they could try and distract the audience into hating someone else more. Naturally, this blew up in their faces as it always did.
And of course, this tactic comes back later on, and Ozpin is allowed to come back from hiatus just as soon as Miles and Kerry smashed Ironwood’s character into pieces and made him an evil asshole and as unsympathetic as they possibly could. As of now, Ozpin has effectively been absolved by the story, not for actually making up for any of his crimes, but because the leader who was frankly better suited to the role had officially been scrapped.
Qrow Branwen
Color: Black
Referential Figure: The Scareqrow
Qrow Branwen remains, to this day, an obnoxiously popular character, at least among the remaining fanbase. Despite not being universally liked in his heyday, the RWBY fanbase did not castigate him the way they did Jaune and Ozpin, and I attribute this to two things:
- Qrow has not gotten popular characters injured or killed by being an idiot
- Qrow is more difficult to spot as a Mary Sue since the patch jobs were largely successful, in contrast to those of Jaune and Ozpin.
Qrow’s arrival to the scene in Volume 3, coupled with cursing, explicit alcoholism, and an antagonistic relationship with a character (Ironwood) that fans had already decided was scorn-worthy, meant that he coincided well with RWBY’s maturing tone and fans had an instant favorite to latch onto. Combined with his manpain fest about his ‘curse’ come Volume 4, and his place among the RWBY tier list was sealed.
It helps that he’s one of the few characters whose attempted improvements on MK’s part was largely successful, as stated above, due to them switching gears and actually addressing the problem. Unlike the Sue characters we’ve already covered, Qrow’s alcoholism was actually called out as the problem it was, and his poor showing as a trusted adult in a crowd full of teenagers was, by extension, acknowledged.
Regardless, his flaws shined through. The one consistent character trait Qrow possessed was that he is a bully. The dude’s just a gigantic asshole—he’s demanding, rude, and any time he doesn’t immediately get his way, he responds with aggression and sometimes physical violence—the latter demonstrated in Volumes 5 and 6. Winter is doing absolutely nothing wrong besides being present? Asshole. Ironwood didn’t text him when he absolutely shouldn’t be while Qrow was doing spy work? Asshole. Pyrrha expressing fondness for her team members? Asshole. Qrow needs to draw out Tyrian? Asshole and also hideously irresponsible guardian. Qrow wants to go get Raven and the spring maiden immediately and Lionheart won’t let him? Asshole. Let’s stop there before we reach the part where he attacks a man with a shattered arm.
And to viewers who aren’t susceptible to manpain tactics, this made Qrow unlikeable. It was simply unacceptable that Qrow was allowed to behave the way he was when characters like Yang apparently had to go on plot-heavy personal journeys to master their anger and characters like Weiss had to be taught how to act like decent people by learning the power of friendship. Even in casual situations, I’d be very embarrassed to have an uncle like Qrow Branwen, because he just treats people like shit. The alcoholism, if it was intended to offset this by making Qrow the funny drunk guy, was absolutely not doing so, making Qrow only look worse as he was portrayed as casually and regularly partaking in a vice that made him less focused when he’s supposed to be the adult in charge, while Weiss’ mother was declared a bad guardian by the narrative for possessing the same vice. By the time Qrow actually became enjoyable in his own right, it was Volume 7, and a fair amount of people had already checked out.
Like literally every other character, Volume 7 is Qrow at his best, mostly because it gives him someone his own age to bounce off of (Clover) and he never gets aggressive or violent with anyone he’s ostensibly on the same side as, and because the whole manpain angle is nipped in the bud and he gets to just be a character without the raincloud looming over him. Naturally, this is all wasted by the end, where Clover’s murder is immediately followed up by making Qrow sit in a cell with Robyn as his tether to the world while he vows vengeance against Ironwood, who has less to do with Clover’s death than Qrow himself does.
Overall, Qrow simply spent a lot more time being frustrating than enjoyable, and entirely too much of his time was spent being used by Miles and Kerry to attack characters they believed deserved it.
James Ironwood
Color: ???
Referential Figure: The Tin Woodsman
James Ironwood has the indignity of being perhaps the one character most hated by Miles Luna and friends. His only competition in that area is Adam Taurus.
Unlike Adam Taurus, though, I’ve never been able to understand why Ironwood was derailed the way he was. With Adam, it was obviously racism, but I’m left scratching my head as to why Ironwood fell the way he did. I’ve never seen so much spite bleed through the screen as when Ironwood in late Volume 7 or early Volume 8 was acting like a mustache-twirling villain and jumping to every possible method of making himself unsympathetic that Miles and Kerry could think up. I don’t think it’s an anti-military tract; RWBY stans love to suggest that it is, and that Ironwood represents fascism in some form and that the narrative contains a leftist bent against militaristic nationalism, but these aren’t really visible in RWBY, and Rooster Teeth simply aren’t the type. Remember, they’re a Texas-based, anti-union, harshly-run company with a highly “gamerbro” image, with a history of open bigotry from racism to sexism to homophobia, with Miles and Kerry endorsing all of the above through their writing. The idea of them being critical of the American military is excessively unrealistic.
But nonetheless, there’s no denying what we saw onscreen. Even if it hadn’t been said by Miles’ own admission, it’d be clear onscreen; abundant time is spent in Volumes 2 and 3 trying to make Ironwood look bad, and as I mentioned earlier, this only really ended up making him sympathetic by virtue of being surrounded by unhelpful (and in Qrow’s case, combative) assholes. It’s the classic Scary Sue effect: the character’s opposition to the hero of the story (Ozpin) is intended to come off as evil, but ends up saying much more accurate things about them than the author wants.
Ironwood took a break from being so heavily involved in the story in Volume 4, and in that season, the one possible instance of trying to make Ironwood look bad (in which he was essentially called a control freak by Jacques) fell flat because a) Ironwood was highly justified in wanting more security measures after what happened to Beacon, b) the character criticizing him was Jacques Schnee, a billionaire asshole and abusive father with no regard for anyone or anything except himself and his profit margins, and c) Ironwood was double justified in his security measures once it was clear he was on the money about Leonardo Lionheart being untrustworthy, proving that Ironwood had a more accurate picture of Ozpin’s coalition than Ozpin himself.
After that, Ironwood vanished from the plot for two years in Volumes 5 and 6—meaning, he was nowhere to be seen in RWBY’s worst volumes up until Volume 8—and this meant that, by the time Volume 7 came along, most of the remaining fans had accepted that he was more heroic than they’d initially wanted to believe, and ate their words.
Volume 7 is a volume in which James Ironwood is essentially the main character. While it is everyone’s best volume, it’s the best by far for him personally, wherein he gets a significant amount of screentime and characterization and it takes up until the very end for Miles and Kerry to ruin it. The story finally seemed to be going in a good direction, building off of the more heroic qualities he displayed and correcting on the skewed dynamic between him and his peers in earlier volumes, while putting him in realistically problematic situations that have to be carefully navigated. In sharp contrast to Ozpin, who made wildly bad choices and never seemed to have any idea what he was doing except lying, Ironwood comes off as someone who is making the best of a bad situation and aiming for a more permanent solution.
Needless to hammer it in further, the way Ironwood behaves from the last parts of Volume 7 and the entirety of Volume 8 is still shockingly out of character to this day. There’s no rhyme or reason to any of his behaviors except acting as unlikeably villainous as possible, regardless of whether his actions line up with his stated intentions. His villainy completely overshadowed that of Salem and was in violation of both the previously shown version of him and the version alleged by Miles and Kerry to have undergone a fall from grace. No defense for it is available, because there is no thoroughfare from one of those to the other two.
There were two fan responses that I saw: abandonment and relapse, with most remaining fans leaving in disgust at this gross derailment (which came sandwiched between two other gut punches with the deaths of Clover and Penny), and what few remained swallowing the Miles and Kerry bait that Ironwood was a bastard who deserved everything they gave him and returning to the Ironwood-bashing days of Volume 2, which appears to have been the real intention all along.
The only guess I have as to why Miles and Kerry behaved this way about Ironwood is that he distances himself from Ozpin, with the available interpretation that Ozpin’s shadiness and eventual fall as a mentor to the heroes may have been contrasted against Ironwood’s rise as a trustworthy authority figure on the heroes’ side in the OG script. It hasn’t passed me by that the Wizard of Oz, Ozpin’s inspiration, was originally a conman and a usurper who ruled by way of deceit, something Miles and Kerry appeared to have tried to subvert by making everyone else look awful so that Ozpin can be the true leader. Nor does it pass me by that the Tin Woodsman they created, who they lambasted through Qrow as ‘not having a heart’ and eventually warped into a vile, cold-blooded murderer, was the kindest and gentlest of Dorothy’s companions in the original story and never truly needed the heart the Wizard gave him. With Oscar’s inspiration, according to enough fans to make it onto the wiki, being the original ruler of Oz whose throne was usurped, this whole farce is perhaps the biggest display of irony brought about by not actually reading the source material that I’ve ever seen.
But at the end of the day, I’m not any more sure in that guess as to why than in any other. All I can say is that what happened with Ironwood only woke me up as to the depths of pettiness and spite that Miles and Kerry were capable of, and that this character stands as a testament to how badly wrong a story can go when it’s handled by people who hold grudges.
And with that, we are going to have to leave off here. Ironwood rounds off the main cast, and we’re 20 pages in, so this entry into the final thoughts will unfortunately have to be split. We’ll tackle the supporting cast, the villains, and everyone else next post.
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RWBY Final Thoughts: Story | Table of Contents | RWBY Final Thoughts: Characters (Part II)
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Date: 2024-01-29 03:08 pm (UTC)From:Your bit about Ironwood reminded me of that.
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Date: 2024-01-30 04:03 am (UTC)From: