RWBY Final Thoughts: Characters (Part II)

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RWBY Final Thoughts: Characters (Part I) | Table of Contents | RWBY Final Thoughts: Style
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Hey, welcome back to the Final Thoughts for RWBY. Last time, we finished up the main cast, so now we’re gonna tackle everyone else.

Supporting Cast

Sun Wukong

Sun Wukong is who I think of when I think of RWBY’s side characters. One who is obviously not central to the story as a whole but is closely linked to the main cast and has a wealth of their own personality and interesting traits. Along with Penny Polendina, side cast was pretty cleanly his designation, given that he only debuted once Volume 1-era RWBY had all its chickens in order and had set everything up, and was finally willing to try actually having a story.

Supporting characters differ from background characters in that they actually have to be characterized and there’s an expectation that they fulfill at least one major role in the story without necessarily being critical to all of it. Where background characters can slot in and out as needed without causing too much fuss, neglect or misuse of the side cast doesn’t tend to slip by so easily.

Love to Be a Part of It Someday: 106

Each level of our cast, from main characters to side characters to antagonists, can claim at least one severely mishandled character that was the victim of authorial spite. Yet while Adam Taurus and James Ironwood were the victims of derailments so severe and visible from space that it’s difficult to take in at times, Sun is the only one whose humiliation at the hands of Miles and Kerry has continued in spite of him having left the story by the time of the Volume 6 premiere.

Sun was an entertaining and engaging character, when he was allowed to be. Ultimately, efforts to remove him from the story kicked in before we could learn too much about Sun that was only about and for Sun himself, rather than letting him orbit around Blake, but even then he managed to be endearing. Much of the reason fans (who weren’t insane shippers) liked Sun early on was because of the dynamic between him, Blake, and Adam, with Sun very clearly representing everything that Adam wasn’t and a better future for the faunus beyond what Adam was willing to turn the White Fang into. This of course only made it that much more frustrating when signs from the show pointed towards that love from fans being anything but matched by the writers, or at least certain of them.

Sun was pretty clearly intended to be a major ally to team RWBY and it was abundantly obvious he was the primary—well, the only—love interest for Blake Belladonna in particular. But while Adam was going to be an antagonist anyway and Ironwood had already been built up as opposing the Great and Benevolent Ozpin on at least some level, derailing Sun wasn’t much of an option. His whole personality can generally be boiled down to “nice, honest guy who sometimes acts like a dork,”, none of which is easily bent into an unsympathetic portrayal...so rather than try and warp him into a jerk, Miles simply wrote him out instead.

I made a point of documenting this early on, in that much of the way Sun was implemented (or not implemented) in Volumes 2 and 3 smacks of obvious cuts being made with the aim of reducing his screentime. The intervention to keep Sun from actually being in the story was clumsy and careless and sloppy; the cleaner solution would’ve been to just excise Sun from the story entirely without commenting on his absence, and what we got instead is what convinces me that not only was Sun disliked by Miles’ half of the control room, but someone on the other half was fighting to keep him in the story (and losing). Many of the times Sun manages to be onscreen are times when a character that truly was meant to be one-off and less important would have been cut, and in many other characters’ cases, were. But Sun persists.

Miles held a Cameo post-Volume 9 (meaning, post Bee kiss) about how if he could go back and change something from early RWBY, he’d tone down the Sun/Blake vibes since, as we all know, Bumbleby was the plan from the very beginning (this is a lie). Stuff like this is revisionism in action, because—although I shouldn’t need to reiterate this—I was there. I watched these episodes as they originally aired all the way back in 2013 and onward, I watched the producing, voice acting, and writing cast interactions unfolding as they happened, I saw what this show was written to be and how the “CRWBY” behaved about it, something most of the remaining fanbase can’t claim, and Miles knows that. Knowing Sun was heavily edited out of the story and watching Miles say he would have ‘toned him down’ even further is a) something I can absolutely believe, but b) not for the reasons he says. If Miles actually had managed to tone down Sun’s romance with Blake in early volumes, Sun would not have been there at all, because that very quickly became all that Sun actually was. The “ship that fans accidentally convinced themselves was real in spite of obvious evidence that something else was endgame” was there, but it was very much not Sun/Blake.

Of course, the evidence that Miles disliked Sun and was very poor at hiding it only increased in Volumes 4 and 5, because Sun was with Blake, who was cut off from her teammates and the rest of the larger plot, and there were no longer other matters to keep the two from bonding, and I personally believe this is why we saw Sun so viciously abused by both the narrative and Blake from there on. Miles can claim whatever the hell he wants, but the onscreen material says very clearly that he resented Sun and didn’t want him in the story.

But why? Why did this happen? Because I don’t think it had a damn thing to do with Yang or Bumbleby, at least not early on. Those may have been what ultimately got Sun booted out of the show, but they were not what caused the huge divide I saw.

I brought up Sun during Jaune’s character slot because I believed the way the story treated him was, potentially, rooted in jealousy, and Miles Luna’s inability to separate himself from the story. I’m going to dwell on that now.

Ever since hearing about it on a critical fan’s livestream, I’ve been obsessing over a rumor I haven’t been able to find any proof of, but strongly imagine to be at least partially true, said rumor being that Miles initially auditioned for Sun—who is presented as this cool, likable, charming guy and was described in one word by Monty Oum as “ABS”—but was then cast as Jaune instead.

I will remind you guys that Arryn Zech, Blake Belladonna’s voice actor, is Miles Luna’s ex-girlfriend, and that Blake Belladonna’s love interest was very clearly intended to be Sun Wukong in the first five volumes of RWBY. The way Sun and his team members are repeatedly snipped out of scenes and downplayed by the story while they’re there already looked like evidence of a schism, but with that in mind, it makes everything worse. It would add a very disgusting layer of subtext to pretty much everything that Sun goes through under Miles Luna’s pen, including the part where Blake just slaps the shit out of him twice, which as I’ve already mentioned, Miles claimed to be a communication error on the animation department’s behalf, an obvious lie. With the depths of spite that Miles has already displayed with regards to other characters he doesn’t like, I can’t say it would be a stretch.

I don’t think Miles Luna was particularly enthused about Bumbleby. With the character he’s displayed so far both in and out of the writing room, I very much doubt he was just the progressive type to write a WLW romance from the get-go in *checks notes* 2013 when he was freely saying the N slur and F slur. However, when the time came to pivot RWBY in the gaybait direction, I also very much doubt he was going to bat to protect the role Sun was supposed to have in the story.

Frankly, I’m eyeing Michael Jones and waiting for a revelation.

Penny Polendina

Penny Polendina is, in a word, a victim. She is the perpetual victim, and like Ironwood, she is one of the ultimate proofs of how little Miles and Kerry gave a damn about this story or the characters in it.

Penny is characterized, in both of her “eras”, largely by self-doubt. Her doubts in being a legitimate person, her doubts in her role as protector of Mantle, and her doubt in the power structures of Atlas that make her question what’s right and wrong. The obvious counterpart to her self-doubt that she, at least in Volume 7, seemed to be embracing was determination. Her status as a “real girl” is effectively validated by the winter maiden’s power passing to her, who was someone who could be trusted above anyone else to use it for the right purposes. From there, what she needs validated is what kind of real girl she wants to be.

The natural endpoint of her arc would have been to have her stand up to a bigger, stronger force that tries to force her into doubts again. I’m sure Miles would’ve nominated Ironwood given the direction Volume 8 went, but the obvious choice is Salem, for whom these tactics are repeatedly stated to be her bread and butter. Penny had obvious desires to be a hero and these aligned well with the story once heroes started to run low, with Lionheart and Ozpin both out of the picture.

But we all know how this ended. Unlike with Ironwood, I don’t think Miles had any dislike for Penny—but I do think he absolutely did not care about her enough to reign himself in. Penny’s second death, coming after a string of brutal treatment that was downright sickening in the delight it took in making her suffer, was very obviously done for no other reason than because Miles, a basic and predictable writer possessed of immense unchecked spite, had originally written the winter maiden’s power going to the chick with the name Winter, and was course-correcting. The fact that Penny had to die to undo the maiden’s power going to her was of no consequence to him.

What kills me is that they knew this would piss people off. They knew this would upset fans who were already showing a huge amount of grace even being present after Volumes 5 and 6. I can only suppose Miles and Kerry thought RWBY would be around forever and that they thus didn’t need to be careful with who they demonized or killed off, and thus we got what we’re looking at now.

I struggle to imagine what difference the Winter Maiden’s power makes to Winter Schnee herself. Her being the person it was designated to transfer to by Ironwood was a means of showing Ironwood’s trust in her and that she was a good choice to be involved in the fight against Salem—her choice to accept that power when the time came was sure and without hesitation, in sharp contrast to Pyrrha’s turmoil over the same issue. The actual power was inconsequential—even less so once they derailed Ironwood. What were Miles and Kerry going to do with Winter Schnee the Winter Maiden? We don’t know, and I imagine they don’t either, but like hell they were going to let Penny keep it.

But Penny should have kept it, and should have stayed, and should have gotten to become a complete character. She would’ve been an excellent choice to go head to head with Cinder (as evidenced by that time she whooped Cinder, Neo, and Emerald in one go), with Penny’s desire to protect people and love for her friends contrasted against Cinder’s selfish desires for power and no real desire for friends, only tools. It would’ve made a great turn-around: I highlighted the foil between Pyrrha and Penny that was so evident in their fateful matchup. Cinder at her mightiest took down one of these red-headed, green-eyed heroines. The warrioress dressed in armor with sword and shield put up a good fight, but fell—and Cinder’s ultimate downfall could easily come by the hand of the unassuming girl with a mechanical, futuristic nature.

But whatever happened, Penny deserved so much better than what she was given.

Taiyang Xiao Long

Taiyang is a strange kind of character to talk about, in that the only times I feel like I’ve ever talked about him at all were in response to people unusually obsessed with him. I’m aware there are rabid Taiyang stans who behave in a similar manner to the Jaune stans, but what I’m mostly talking about are the people who dedicate an unreasonable amount of anger at him for things that aren’t really that big a deal, not really his fault, or both—and we’ll talk more about than in Raven’s character slot.

Taiyang is kind of what a side character done right looks like, in that he’s one of the few I can’t say was spited, twisted, victimized, or derailed by a Miles and Kerry narrative, and he largely got to be what he was intended to be while he was onscreen. A lack of overall involvement in the plot is the only real issue here, given that we’d largely expect a lot of said involvement from the man we’re told so much about before actually getting to meet him.

Taiyang is presented as essentially a good and well-meaning person who has realistic flaws. Raven’s leaving hurt him deeply, as it undoubtedly would for anyone who was in love, and when it seemed like he had finally found new love and could be happy again, Summer Rose dies. This hits him hard enough that he essentially shuts down and it costs him the ability to be a good parent, forcing Yang to grow up faster than she otherwise would’ve had to in order to compensate. The narrative doesn’t really hold this against Taiyang through the mouths of Yang or Ruby, and so neither do we (sensible fans).

Our major looks at Taiyang beyond that all come in Volume 4, which is his only real claim to screentime. Taiyang does the best he can with a traumatized daughter he has a limited ability to help, encouraging her to try and live like a person again and not like a shell, even if he’s unable to really offer her the help the truthfully needs to do that (which is therapy, basically). For all that Taiyang was said to have been deeply damaged by two losses of lovers back to back, and for all his relationship with Qrow doesn’t seem to be the best from the little we see of it, what we see of Taiyang shows us that he has fond memories of his history with his teammates and is able to freely talk about them. In essence, he’s the picture of a healed individual and what we can hopefully look forward to from Yang.

Much like abundant other characters, I could say I wanted more from him, but he mostly made it out of the Miles and Kerry Machine miraculously unscathed.

Winter Schnee

Winter Schnee, though she ended up falling flat on her face by the time of Volume 8 as most of the cast that were in that season did, has the distinction of making out with a remarkably clean getaway, having been absent for the show’s worst volumes (5, 6) and benefiting the most from its best ones (3, 7).

It’s about the best split you could get in a show like this. While Winter may have originally butted heads with Weiss’ theme of loneliness early on, by the time of Volume 7 she becomes a rounded character, with flaws, wants, convictions, and doubts. She ends up bouncing off of Weiss much better and even contrasts her prior characterization in the right way—in Volume 3, Winter was summed up as the logical extreme of Weiss in finesse, form, dignity, and deadly grace, as well as what her powers and combat style might look like when fully developed. However, in Volume 7, Weiss has returned to Atlas with an extraordinary amount of growth under her belt, and though Winter is as flawless in the technical aspects as ever, we get to see her more humanized and see how she reacts to weaknesses we didn’t know she had.

Neither Weiss nor Winter likes being in the Schnee manor again, yet for Winter, having to watch Jacques smarm and scheme and manipulate right in front of her like the leech he is, knowing what kind of person he really is, breaks her open more effectively than Qrow’s taunts ever could. Nonetheless, we see that Winter is not what was previously made of her—Qrow was wrong about her not being suitable for the inner circle, and he was wrong about her being a sell-out. Weiss at first balks at the enormity of the destiny seemingly thrust upon her by Ironwood, but Winter assures her that it was her choice and one she believes in wholeheartedly. Winter may be reserved and professional, but she’s neither unkind nor naive.

Her interactions with Penny are particularly enjoyable, as it’s obvious Winter is made uncomfortable not by Penny’s naivete, but by her ability to speak and voice her feelings without filter and wear her heart on her sleeve, knowing that the world around her simply won’t cooperate with an attitude like that.

Granted, Volume 8 doesn’t really work well with her, but the mere fact that I don’t have any real complaints about how she was viciously mistreated by the narrative should tell you that she comes out relatively okay. Much like Penny, I don’t believe Miles and Kerry actually care about Winter positively or negatively either way, I think her name on a paper was simply something they were unwilling to deviate from. And I’m sure, to them, her rebelling against Ironwood in the final act was a brilliant move showing how she was now as #free as Weiss, if you don’t look too closely at how she as a side-effect was made to essentially give no shits about either her personal villain (her father) or her home continent.

So, basically, D+.

Ghira and Kali Belladonna

These two characters are some of the flattest characters that have ever snuck their way onto a Side Cast list.

I’ve lambasted them time and again for this, but these two essentially aren’t characters. At least Ilia can claim that she ostensibly exists for a deeper reason with respect to the racism subplot. Ghira and Kali, however, don’t add anything new or fresh, expose no new and previously-unexamined sides to the conflict, and are simply there to be the Good Tokens. They don’t want violent activism, and they love Blake and want what’s best for her, so how could they be wrong?

They were never interesting, they were never entertaining, and quite honestly they were frequently annoying.

Ilia Amitola

What’s sad about Ilia Amitola is that she’s probably the best example of unsubtlety on the part of Miles and Kerry and why exactly counts like Pay No Attention existed throughout the recap. Her alleged primary purpose in the story—to serve the anti-terrorist (albeit truthfully just racist) angle as a redemption from the side of villainy came second to her actual primary purpose, which was to be a lesbian.

That’s it. That was the whole point of her. She served as a way for Rooster Teeth to call attention to how progressive they are and earn pats on the back from their loyals.

Granted, I don’t necessarily think LGBT people need to have a reason behind being in the shows they’re in. They should get to just be there, the way cis and straight people do. The problem is that that isn’t what Ilia gets to be—her being a lesbian was a calculated move to try and appease LGBT fans who remained vocal into 2017 about the lack of sexual diversity in the show. And the sad thing is that despite being the best attempt Miles and Kerry ever made for presence alone (which is a very bad summation of their track record on this front), it didn’t even work. Bumbleby fans were not at all lessened in their demands for their specific ship, and Miles and Kerry were eventually forced to write it in once their colossal missteps in Volume 5 alienated pretty much everyone whose attachment to the show didn’t hinge on it.

So in the end, Ilia existed for nothing. It’s not like she added any real nuance to the racism allegory, because she was simply an example of a villainous minority being “saved” from Evil Activism rather than embracing it, let alone examining it in any depth.

Ilia stopped existing pretty much as soon as she was redeemed, with nary a single hint there were any further plans for her, and to be honest that was probably for the best.

Raven Branwen

Raven Branwen was, like her ex-lover, also a strange character to talk about. Although I had significant praise for her by the time of her last appearance, it won’t stop me from remarking on the fact of her misuse by the writers and, furthermore, the odd ways she’s perceived by both them and the fans.

I already remarked in Yang’s slot that Raven should have been the personal villain she would ultimately vanquish; she’s characterized in ways that heavily contrast her daughter and there is bad blood between them.

What they did with her while she was onscreen was fairly interesting enough, rather like seeing an improved take on famously divisive characters from plenty of other series; though her cunning and skill are impressive, she is not allowed to skate by without being savaged for her shortcomings, and it’s this that keeps her both an enjoyable and interesting character. She’s not “morally gray”, she’s just a self-serving asshole, and she’s effectively told as much to her face in-story.

So why does it feel like, over the next few years of her absence from the show, the narrative has somehow changed for the worse?

Originally, Raven felt like the kind of character that Rooster Teeth (meaning, Miles and Kerry) managed to do better with than the fanbase, in that being a woman did not stop her from being held responsible for her misdeeds, something quite plainly lost on a disturbing number of fans. However, this certainly made Raven the odd one out amongst female characters and especially villainesses, as Miles quickly proved he had no restraint and that, as far as he was concerned, anything with tits was as good as sympathetic, from Emerald all the way to Cinder herself. By the time RWBY fell short of a finish line, closing on Volume 9 but never managing to get the greenlight for Volume 10, Raven found herself in Volume 9’s last episode in a scene showed that she was working with Summer Rose at the time of her death—though even Summer Rose held open dislike for her—which had apparently convinced the remaining fandom that Raven was secretly good all along somehow. What causes me to furrow my brow is not that reaction, but the follow-up “epilogue” to Volume 9 shown at RTX in absence of a Volume 10 snippet, in which Raven shows up, escorts the heroines to where they need to be, and there are apparently no ill feelings between them. It’s this that confirms to me that, despite how Raven was originally set up, Miles and Kerry don’t seem to believe she’s done anything worth keeping distance between her and the heroic faction, much like with Emerald.

And I think the truth is that RWBY has gotten away with this largely because it’s bumping shoulders with a very ugly crowd—the radfem crowd. I’ve already seen my share of complaints from certain fans and ex-fans about radfem mentality among RWBY fans, and I think they make up an uncomfortably large portion of the fans that center their attention on Raven. It would certainly explain why Raven’s crimes, up to and included admitted murder of a young girl for power, seem to not matter in the face of a largely invented narrative that places her as a woman who found her freedom from a man (Taiyang).

Even critical fans aren’t immune from this. I’ve seen people in the quote-unquote “rwde” crowd talk about how it’s bizarre that people think Raven should’ve stayed with Yang and Taiyang if she didn’t feel like being a mother—completely forgetting that we’ve been shown no evidence that Raven and Taiyang’s relationship wasn’t happy and that Yang wasn’t planned. This is one of the ways in which Raven is a perfect example of ‘switch the genders and the reactions change’. Once the kid’s out and the family home is in place, yeah, it does kind of make you an asshole to just decide it doesn’t suit you. The strange presumption that Raven had Yang and instantly split due to not being ready for parenthood is pretty generous and you can be sure there would be no such sympathy if Raven were the guy.

Even if you want to include the Volume 9 finale scene, for what measure it would change things, Raven’s exact words are that Summer is better at that life than she was—even looking uncomfortable at the thought of Tai and Yang being left behind. In other words “I still care about them or at least feel mildly guilty, but I don’t feel like doing it, so here, they’re your problem.”

But in the end, it doesn’t matter. While I’m confident Raven would’ve simply been outright ruined as a character had she found her way into more of the show later on, she still ended up as a failure to capitalize. She had a much bigger potential than what was utilized, and her selfishness and failure to see the true downward path she was on was a rich vein that went only partially tapped.

Maria Calavera

Maria Calavera is the kind of character that makes a person sigh, largely because she creates such a good impression but, like so many that do, just doesn’t last.

Maria Calavera seemed like one of the rare honest attempts at a step in the right direction from Miles and Kerry, beleaguered as they were with complaints from the fanbase, whose barbs to the effect of RWBY being a show that was too white, thin, and straight were becoming sharper and coming more frequently with the decreasing quality of the story. In comes Maria Calavera—an ethnic (Latina) character who isn’t young, pretty, and spry with great tits or other easily-objectified traits, and is disabled. Not only that, but she’s a figure of great respect and near-mythologization among the heroic leagues of the world. About the only way they could’ve done better would’ve been to make Maria a faunus, so that list of cast members could finally increase.

Atop this, Maria is quite interesting and entertaining for the one volume in which she matters. She’s jaded, but still heroic, quick-witted and reliable, but still hindered by her age and disability. She is a character who is, frankly, much more welcome as a mentor for the heroic new generation than Qrow, who was pissing me off more often than not. She was a bona fide badass in her youth, and even if she’s too old to move mountains anymore, she still carries her weight where it matters, helping Ruby unlock and make use of her silver eyes.

Volume 7 couldn’t save everyone, of course, and Maria is one of the few who didn’t benefit from its improvements as she was almost unheard from the entire volume. When she does get to come back in Volume 8, it does seem like she’ll continue her streak of being awesome, instantly protective of Penny as she is and willing and able to go toe-to-toe with Neo in a really amazing moment. Naturally though, Maria drops off the face of the planet, quite literally, and the result is one of the worst evidences I’ve ever seen of just how little Miles and Kerry cared about this story, in that they just forget about her.

Once the Amity Colosseum drops out of the sky at the end of Volume 8’s fifth episode, Maria Calavera and her fate after that goes completely unmentioned, alongside that of Pietro Polendina. It’s an astounding display of just not giving a shit, because I could not fathom a writer with their wits about them just neglecting to follow up on whether a character as beloved as Maria Calavera lived or died or what her status inbetween those could possibly be. We don’t even get knowledge of what happened with the Colosseum itself later, and whether it managed to stay aloft or crash-landed, to at least put us on our toes. Nothing.

You’d think that, after the filler volume that Volume 9 was, someone might’ve reminded Miles to follow up on that, but no. Not even in the “Volume 9 Epilogue” do we get any updates on her. Whether she’s alive or dead is unknown.

And truthfully it probably doesn’t matter at this point.

Caroline Cordovin

Until dethroned by the Red Prince, this was the single most obnoxious and annoying character Miles and Kerry ever managed to create, which is not a mark of distinction to wear with pride. She barely seemed real, as if she walked out of another, less interesting show with much smaller stakes.

Some pity must be spared to her for the indignity of existing, it seems, largely to push another series entirely (Gen:Lock), but otherwise, my memories of watching Cordovin onscreen only bring a frown to my face. Like so many characters on this list, she simply never managed to be interesting despite paltry attempts at depth. Her actions never made any sense, her personality wasn’t interesting or ever relatable, she wasn’t dastardly enough to be satisfying in her defeat, and what entertainment value she was seemingly supposed to provide was excessively juvenile and one-note.

She was a waste of time, effort, and money, and she will not be missed.

Clover Ebi

Not for nothing did Qrowver, aka Fair Game, become the single most dominant ship of the fandom outside of Bumbleby itself. Clover Ebi was an almost weirdly likable character, given what fans had come to expect from incoming casts and how poorly Miles and Kerry tended to juggle them. And while Pyrrha and Sun may have suffered for essentially orbiting around the characters they are meant to benefit, Clover was enjoyable for how he and Qrow bounced off of one another, rather than essentially being one character and their arm candy.

That doesn’t mean he’s an excellent character, of course, and perhaps it was our fault for expecting more of him given the tantalizingly gay look and feel of his interactions with Qrow. Clover has the distinct ring of a character that, had they lasted longer and made it through more seasons, might’ve actually become a fan favorite. Yet, not to put the point in it too lightly (sorry), when he dies it doesn’t really feel meaningful. Quite unlike the death of Pyrrha, whose lingering effects on Jaune are relentlessly belabored, Clover’s death just feels mean-spirited and done for no other reason than to swipe away something fans were enjoying and make sure any development Qrow actually got was temporary.

And, of course, homophobia.

Robyn Hill

Robyn is an excessively rare character type in RWBY, even moreso than Clover, in that she’s frustrating in a good way. Whereas Qrow comes off as the kind of character who has every reason to behave in better ways than he actually does, Robyn’s friction with the heroic faction comes largely due to genuine passion for her people’s safety and the erroneous idea that she has enough facts to make the difference.

Once she does have more facts, of course, by then it’s too late, and bad decisions by all parties nonetheless made in good faith have collided into a world of shit for everyone involved. Nonetheless, she sees the light, and willingly works together with Ironwood, someone she professed antagonism towards, because they share the common goal of protecting people.

Naturally, late Volume 7 and later Volume 8 make for nothing good with Robyn, with her being knocked out and injured in a copter crash and essentially held hostage by Clover to force Qrow’s surrender, even with the much more sensible option on the table of Clover taking Robyn to get help while Qrow deals with the escaped Tyrian—something that would be beneficial to literally all parties, because it would a) show that Clover can think beyond Ironwood’s orders while making a critical move to protect someone, as is his job and passion, b) would allow Qrow and Tyrian a proper standoff to settle their score, c) wouldn’t kill off Clover in a display of spite and idiocy, and most importantly for Robyn, d) would allow her to wake up both forced to work with Clover and, assuming things follow the terrible Volume 8 trajectory, in enemy territory with some stealth sequences ready to roll out.

Instead, Robyn is knocked out almost immediately, sleeps through a threeway fight to the death, and is incarcerated for almost the entirety of Volume 8 with her only role being to sit there and be the woman that helps Qrow deal with his manpain. It’s quite obvious given Miles’ relative predictability that Robyn probably would’ve gone on to be his love interest, had things continued. Qrow, Robyn. Both bird names with a single letter swapped out for a more exotic spelling. Miles would do something like that.

Because men aren’t validated if they don’t have a woman and women’s only purposes are to be there for men, right? Certainly Robyn’s relationships with the Happy Huntresses might’ve corrected that idea, had they actually been explored, but they weren’t, because Robyn was busy sitting in prison comforting Sadboi Qrow.

Little, aka Somewhat

I hate this character.

This character is entirely pointless, in a manner more extreme than even Cordovin, let alone Ghira and Kali. The ostensible reason they are taken along with the heroes is for help navigating the Ever After, something which it immediately becomes clear they aren’t capable of doing.

There is no real reason they’re there at all, and even the reason I speculated would eventually come to fruition turned out to be wrong. If you’ll remember, I thought that despite Little’s complete apathy to all nearby situations and utter lack of contributions to the team dynamic, that they would eventually have their big moment where they, in the depths of their innocence and naivete, restore a broken Ruby Rose’s hope. Well, that didn’t fucking happen. Little is brutally crushed right before Ruby’s eyes to shatter the very last remnants of it, as it happens. So in essence, Little is entirely pointless. There would be no real difference in their character had they been a non-sapient mouse that wasn’t capable of speech, and every bit of screentime spent establishing as much was wasted, but hey! At least Rooster Teeth can claim non-binary rep now, right?

This doesn’t exactly change for the one scene in which Little returns post-ascension, with an alternate form but no memory of Ruby or her team, and hence no real reason to try and meet up with them, let alone hold them up, in their final scene. This much only happens at all so that Little can round off the apparent theme of the volume (or what Miles and Kerry lazily decided was the theme when it came time to “resolve” things) with an oh-so-inspired drop of: “I’m not one thing, I’m somewhat of a lotta things” because people are not one single trait, dontcha know.

Much wise.

Berry profound.

I have no idea why Little was called Somewhat post-ascension after this, as I can’t find anything indicating that they decided on that as a name, with ‘Little’ having been the moniker Ruby gave them and them otherwise having no name at all, nor needing one. Imagine being stuck with your name essentially being a synonym for ‘uncommitted’.

Antagonists

The Grimm

The Grimm did not necessarily have to be bad or good as characters unto themselves, but they at least needed to be something. As manifestations of evil whose sole purpose is to kill off humankind, the Grimm were naturally going to be most interesting and entertaining when they deviated from that barebones palette.

This, of course, means that the only time the Grimm become at all interesting is the Nuckelavee, arguably the Apathy, and the mutant werewolf Grimm that for some reason is called The Hound. None of them lasts, and only the last of them has any implications for the larger plot, which of course doesn’t make it very far.

A fortress full of Grimm all as intelligent, fearsome, and effective as the Nuckelavee or the Hound might’ve been interesting. Indeed, the Grimm are pretty useful for heightening the fear and tension they add when they aren’t behaving in expected ways, and new variants and mutants were at least interesting for this quality alone.

Yet the largest purpose the Grimm ever serve is fodder. The only time they manage to threaten the heroes outside of the above examples is through sheer numbers. Even Salem’s war on Atlas doesn’t seem like it’s all that dire given that Team FNKI, of all people, seem to be doing pretty okay, and all that’s really necessary to put a stop to it is to kill Monstra, the giant sky whale Grimm that keeps spawning the smaller variants. We never do get any explanation of the underground Grimm-juice river in Volume 8, one more example of things we can beat Miles over the head with given that he—and I’m never going to stop harping on this—got to have his Harrymort Dursley backstory with Cinder.

The Grimm were intimidating in their unknowableness and the inability to reason with or deter them, and characters who could were uniquely evil. But in the end, the Grimm never amounted to much to talk about. Perhaps that makes them better off—lord knows every other character on this list of antagonists was garbage.

Adam Taurus

Don’t give me shit about the order I’m doing these in, I’m doing them in the order they appeared in-series.

Adam completes a perfect triangle with Ironwood and Sun of characters Miles Luna just plain didn’t fucking like. But while the reasoning behind his dislike of Ironwood is a complete mystery to me, and I have uncomfortable guesses as to his dislike of Sun, I know why he didn’t like Adam Taurus: he’s a racist, plain and simple.

Since I haven’t done it in a while, and this’ll be my last chance, I’d like to remind people of what Adam was like in the first three volumes and the Black Trailer. He wasn’t a hated character—in-story or out. I’m saying this because this is a big target for RWBY stan revisionism, but Adam was simply not someone anyone hated in-story except racists, before Volume 3, Episode 11. Blake didn’t hate him—nor did she resent or fear him. We had no indication at all that she’d been hurt by him personally, and unfortunately, I’m not dumb enough to buy the idea that Blake, as an abuse victim, romanticized the guy whose first immediate action upon seeing her again was attempted murder, to the extent that she gave us no visible indications that he was, in fact, that sort of person.

The fact that Rooster Teeth—well, Miles and Kerry mostly, but the whole company deserves blame for this—got away with “Heroes and Monsters” is downright insane. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: only in RWBY would fans look at this and go ‘yep, seems legit’. Any other fandom would be going crazy calling it for the racism-driven derailing that it was.

Because that’s what it was. We went over this in Blake’s character slot—Adam Taurus with any sympathetic qualities was an Adam Taurus that was simply too much for racists to write. Beating him with a character assassination mallet and turning him into a wildly different, vastly less interesting character was a dirty, ethically bankrupt move and I firmly believe the decision to make this about women abused by men was a calculated move to dodge accusations of it being exactly what it was.

Adam feels like the character I’ve talked the most about, and I guess I’d have to give him the Rosalie Hale Award for Complete Inconsistency, mostly achieved via ruthless railroading to enforce author tracts. He went from fallen rebel leader blinded by a need for justice, to a homicidal abusive ex, to a paper tiger wimp who is chased off with minimal effort, to a mad stalker with a brand on his face that became the symbol of Bumbleby’s triumph. Even if any of those characters had been good, and only the first of them had any chance to be, it wouldn’t have made for a very good character overall because it’s just too wild a ride. Adam was never any one type of character long enough to keep fans interested, and the swerves taken with him were more successful in driving fans away than attracting more of them.

I still wonder what this story could’ve been like if Adam had remained what he originally was: a dark ex-friend, a rebel leader, someone willing to use violence to make their points and secure their freedoms. Since Volume 3, everything about Blake and Adam’s story has been incessantly negative, but if you go back and look at the Black Trailer, and listen to Blake’s image song, “From Shadows”...you’ll realize it’s actually a very positive song. Not only is it a duet between Adam and Blake (this is according to commentary, if it wasn’t already obvious enough), but the lyrics are both defiant and righteous. It’s actually a hopeful song, not just about how the two have been beaten down by the hate of a human world, but how they’ll rise above and fly higher despite it. It’s passionate and even a little uplifting. But there’s nothing of that in post-V3 Adam, aka the Adam Miles and Kerry were in control of.

The most entertaining fighting Adam has ever done was still in the Black trailer, and maybe I’m projecting, but it feels like it was because there was more purpose there. Obviously it was the only fighting that made its way into the show that Monty actually did, and that’s probably why. As it is, Adam and what was done to him stands as one of the biggest stains on RWBY’s legacy, one of the biggest black marks on the careers of Miles Luna and Kerry Shawcross, and one of the biggest disgraces to Monty’s memory.

Salem

As the main overarching antagonist, Salem’s biggest benefit was, like the Grimm in general, her unknowability. She lingered in the shadows, a terrible entity whose presence was unheard of to the wider public but whose reputation preceded her among those in the know. It was a good strategy, but one that also relied on being able to fulfill hype, something Rooster Teeth are famously bad at.

Salem’s first scene in the show is technically her voiceover in the first episode, and she’s hinted at inbetween then and Volume 3, but it isn’t until the Volume 3 ending scene that we actually see her and hear her talk for an extended time. The things she says are actually quite chilling. She is someone who has seen everything that’s happened, someone who sees the worth of mankind and their hope and unity and the bright futures they’re capable of creating, and at best gives it mild acknowledgement before proceeding with intents to crush it like so many ants underfoot and set it ablaze like one would their nest. Her addressing Ozpin and singling him out was especially notable, as it said that she knew him on a personal level and would take extra care to hurt him in particular.

If I could make a couple of comparisons, I’d look at Izanami from Persona 4.

Izanami is one of those big bad figures in the SMT/Persona series that lingers in the background influencing events from afar, risen from the collective unconscious of humanity...supposedly. By the time you meet Izanami in Persona 4, the game is a hair’s breadth away from being over, and you’ve seemingly earned your happy ending, and you’ll only meet her by acknowledging that little tickling feeling in the back of your brain that maybe something isn’t right. It turns out she’s the figure in the fog from the dream sequence in the beginning of the game, who by the end of it you’ve more than likely forgotten about entirely.

Izanami’s intents to blanket the world in fog and reduce humanity to mere drifting shadows is by her own admission a choice made by observing the wills of humanity itself, but this is undercut both by a look at her mythology mid-game and by her own malevolent behavior. Per the mythos explained to you, Izanami is driven by spite, a vengeful soul who wants to crush humanity purely to hurt her ex-lover who abandoned her. In the midst of pursuing humanity’s end despite the Investigation Team’s winning the ‘game’ that was the Inaba conflict Adachi created, she makes her attitude towards both them and the humans she’s ostensibly acting on behalf of plain, and the result is someone who was never really interested in humanity’s benefit.

She beautifully contrasts the similar figure that drives the conflict of Persona 3, that being Nyx. In Persona 3, you were told from near the beginning of the game that the world was going to end before the year was up, and are eventually told around December-ish the exact reason for it, with Nyx’s existence and threat level spelled out very clearly. By the time you face her, there’s (well, ostensibly) the scent of tragedy on the air as the conflict leads you to fight what was (by appearances…) a friend, and despite the terror of Nyx that blankets everything, both final boss themes when fighting first her avatar and then her as a whole are badass, triumphant tunes. While the Pharos part of Nyx has that sad friend-turned-evil quality, Nyx’s core that is the final entity fought is very clearly attacking mindlessly, possibly not even sentient.

By contrast, Izanami is not found out until the very slim end, despite her massive influence and power. Unlike Nyx, she is very clearly not only sentient, but sapient, and there’s no sadness or sentimentality or even an air of profundity—this being before you is cold and ruthless. Both of her final boss themes are staggeringly different from The Battle For Everyone’s Souls, emphasizing the unknowable terror of fighting something from the other side that means your world harm. Perhaps the biggest gut punch is when you finally face that terror and whittle her down until her health bar is empty—only for Izanami to not die. To not react at all, in fact.

And that’s why she was the better antagonist. You were thrown into doubt about your mission, and then into absolute despair. One by one, Izanami pulls your friends into the darkness, until you too are inevitably taken—and that’s what makes it so much more powerful when, just as all hope is lost, you stand back up and fight back with a force unparalleled, and achieve greater than the bittersweet deadlock of Persona 3’s ending by killing Izanami for good right then and there.

Salem has all the right elements to be very Izanam-ish indeed. But by the time we’re actually delving into her, we get possibly the worst outcome.

Imagine if all of the shit that happened in the Lost Fable was the backstory of Izanami. Can you see any of what I described above happening? Can you imagine any of that juicy terror and despair and pure triumph if Izanami were, say, a traumatized woman whose gods destroyed the planet because she wanted her man back, and then got dunked in devil juice just laying around for no reason?

It can’t be overstated that all of the things you can talk about Salem for are, mostly, in Volume 6, Episode 3, and not a single one of them is good. From being Ozpin’s ex lover (a possibility the fandom made their hatred of known even before it was actually revealed as canon), to being blamed for the end of the world because she inconvenienced one of the most spiteful, petty fictional gods I’ve ever seen, to rekindling her romance irregardless of her status as a Grimm and Ozpin’s status as a parasite and having kids with him, to trying to take over the world with her hubby at her side, none of it is good. It’s shocking, sure, but all any of it does is make Salem less interesting and less something to be afraid of so much as pitied. Not in a good way, either, as it negatively impacts the aura of fear and power that they still need in the present day.

Salem was never going to be satisfying to defeat to begin with, unless they could shift the narrative so that Ruby had more personal antagonism with her than Ozpin did, because Ozpin was ruined as much as she was and didn’t make for a hero to be rooted for anymore. But the decision to try and illustrate her whole history to make her look as bad as possible to the point of blaming her for things she couldn’t have made happen if she wanted to, just made things impossible to recover from.

Roman Torchwick

We get a break now between major antagonists to examine Roman Torchwick, the muscle of the villains for the first two volumes.

In a way, Roman was emblematic of early RWBY, being more style than substance, but certainly worth investing in either way. Much as Ruby's scythe or Yang's gauntlets, Roman's swaggering with his gun-cane that shot fireworks as ammo was incredibly attractive and eye-catching. Though his first appearance made it clear he was working for someone else, the way he carried himself could easily have spoken to a greater character.

But of course, we've been through this before; I liked Roman well enough, but was never enamored enough with him to match my peers' fervor. Without something to want, a goal to achieve personal to him, Roman was never going to amount to much, and I personally believe he went out about as decently as one could in his position, with no more to contribute to the plot but stretched out and polished into something entertaining enough. Many characters with more to contribute petered out faster and with more ignominious ends. 

Doesn't mean I'm going to read Roman Holiday, but it's still pretty cool.

Cinder Fall

Cinder Fall was attractive as a villainous figure to be rooted against, yet still intriguing enough to want to see more of in early seasons. She was a part of the feminist fantasy as well, with the dark side looking just as deadly and feminine as the light side. Much like Salem, she was built on soft-spoken cruelty, being ruthless but in her case elegant as well. Cinder did evil acts and made them look amazing, and was ahead of the game enough to rarely come off looking worse for it.

Her defeats were satisfying, and while it had been a long time since she had a proper win, the one she eventually gets in Volume 8 didn’t feel earned at all, but rather railroaded. Despite Miles and Kerry’s attempts to say that Cinder had learned from her failures, she ended up following up a string of ill fates and losses with a win that mostly came from bulldozing her way through the heroes one by one. It felt very frustrating to watch, especially when Cinder was actually kind of entertaining while watching her previously clean record and air of fear and power get torn down bit by bit. I stand by my original statement that Cinder should’ve gone to progressively greater and more severe lengths to increase her power, becoming more and more monstrous as she did, while trying to keep up with heroes that had more at their disposal than dusty fairy tale powers they believed would make them invincible—not ingloriously “checkmating” her way to victory when last seen.

As it is, is her “backstory” even worth mentioning? It astounds me that Miles actually managed to force it in after four to five volumes of being told no. The whole thing was pointless, because it reeked of that Lionheart “Partially Kissed Hero” strategy of severely over-exaggerating the abuse suffered by the focal character purely to justify the hideously villainous things they do later and/or the way the abusers are overly punished for it. Cinder’s Cinderella-on-fentanyl tragic backstory episode changed absolutely nothing about her or how viewers would feel about her. It was obvious the ways Cinder had been hurt had to be dialed up or they’d come off as paltry compared to her current day crimes...which they still do, because Cinder had long since passed a sympathy threshold and giving her a backstory where she lands in the care of the most over-the-top wicked stepmother ever wasn’t going to change that. It was purely a waste of time, energy, and money.

What’s there to look forward to now for Cinder? The things that drove fans wanting to see her confronted and defeated were what she did to Pyrrha, but Pyrrha’s been so far removed from the story for so long now that it really doesn’t make a difference anymore—and her fatally wounding Penny doesn’t help either, because it just made the fans angry instead of drawing them in emotionally.

She’s stuck. It’s for the best that RWBY’s over, but especially for her.

Emerald Sustrai

Trying to sum up this character was difficult because these days, all I think of when I try to do so is how frothingly angry I got about her being redeemed for no adequate reason. But I’m gonna cast that away right now and try and remember what she was like in the early days.

Emerald’s thievery habit and falsely positive nature had many fans convinced that she’d play a kind of evil counterpart role to Sun Wukong (again, evidence against the common take that Sun was never that beloved among the fandom). People even thought that since Sun’s namesake had the power to see through illusions, that Sun would eventually unmask Emerald’s deceptions, given that she can cast illusions into people’s heads.

She had a fairly active fanbase, many interested in shipping her with Mercury or alternatively Cinder, and there were many arguments about what her semblance actually was and whether it was her or Mercury who actually had the hallucination powers. There wasn’t a lot of difference in hype between her and Cinder as female villainesses—not even when the offscreen slap happened in Volume 3’s origin story episode, and even when she had the “It’s almost sad” moment at the climax, talk about Emerald not actually being that bad was more the subject of memes contrasting her against Mercury’s blatant glee than anything.

The sympathetic Emerald train only really took off once it was clear Miles was serious about it in Volume Five, trying to pull the “I don’t care about the bigger plot, I just love Cinder uwu” card, apparently not realizing that anyone that had actually seen Emerald’s actions—both the ones ordered by Cinder and otherwise—would not really be moved by that. Emerald’s redemption is yet another example of how Miles and Kerry really didn’t care what was established and went ahead with their plan anyway—and for what?

Why? Why did Emerald need to join the heroes? What critical purpose is she going to serve?

Nothing. The only reason she was redeemed and not Mercury, is because Mercury is a man and Emerald is a woman. That’s the only reason, because Mercury had far more qualities to engender sympathy in the audience than Emerald, who was much more involved in Cinder’s scheme than he was and was equally as eager to kill. And that inescapable knowledge taints her character, and makes her difficult to enjoy, especially because she was moderately entertaining as a villainess. But writers like Miles Luna are, to use the common phrase, basic as hell, and can’t have fun with ruthless villainesses—it taints the fantasy.

Mercury Black

Mercury was someone who fit well into the villain’s web aesthetically. Mercury was smooth-talking and laid back, akin to Cinder, while identified with a more grayscale color scheme than the bright colors of Torchwick or the dark shades of Adam. He was a very welcome addition among fans who, while receiving the largely female cast with amazing positivity, were always eager for men more interesting than Jaune and Ren to talk about.

Mercury’s fighting style made him unusual among characters with ‘assassin’ as their job descriptions given that he carries no weapon and fights exclusively with martial arts and bullets shot from his greaves. The sharp contrasts between him and Yang were of incredible interest to the fandom, especially once Yang acquired a mechanical arm to match his mechanical legs. But this opposing dynamic never really went anywhere, and fans of the banter between him and Emerald weren’t going to have much to look forward to once the Emerald sympathy train left him behind.

Seemingly as a last resort to try and make Mercury interesting, fans of his started up a bizarre but apparently commonly-held fanon that his father Marcus...chopped his legs off.

When I asked around, people insisted this was how Marcus removed Mercury’s semblance, which tells me only that RWBY fans really do not pay the slightest bit of attention, as not only was it abundantly clear from the show’s flashback episode in Volume 3 that Mercury’s legs were damaged in the same fight that killed Marcus, but Mercury outright says that Marcus stole his semblance “with his”, i.e., his semblance is to steal other people’s semblances. Still a stupid plot point, sure, but at the end of the day it was not an indicator that Mercury’s dad lopped off his legs.

This being the case, we have to face the facts that Mercury is just kind of a flat and boring character. Despite some measure of potential sympathy for all the abuse he suffered at his father’s hands, the show never capitalized on it, and was content to let Mercury remain a one-note sociopath—which still could’ve been fun and entertaining, but would’ve required Mercury have some agenda or desires of his own to go with it, which he was never given. Most alarmingly, not only is Mercury’s abuse by Marcus given not nearly the measure of narrative sympathy as Emerald’s dependency on Cinder, but Miles and Kerry seemed fully willing to subject Mercury to further abuse—sexual in nature—at the hands of Tyrian while saying absolutely nothing about it.

Which is terrible. How tone-deaf, exactly can one be?

Neo, aka Neo Politan

Neo featured as an interesting character to watch purely for how Rooster Teeth utilized her. She was a spur-of-the-moment creation, Monty having created her after seeing a gender-bent Torchwick cosplay. The fact that she didn’t have a voice actress on hand was a problem solved by simply making her mute, which was a great decision as it necessitated making up the loss with her body language. Much like some other characters, she was sold on her aura of mystery, being very good at fighting and killing and loyal to Torchwick, with strange and unexplained powers, and no one on the villains’ side was going to explain them.

Of course, not knowing her backstory and motivations also made it difficult to give her a consistent direction to go in, which meant she was swept out of the picture when Volume 3 ended. Even this ended up benefiting Rooster Teeth though, as being a wildly popular character, they could sweep her back in come Volume 6 when the tides had turned against them to secure some spare fan interest.

From there, Neo’s motivations don’t particularly make sense, as she knows Torchwick worked for Cinder, knows he was trying to kill Ruby the night he died, and her villainous grudge against Ruby relies on her not coming to the very obvious conclusion that Torchwick’s death had much less to do with Ruby than his own actions, and if anyone else is to blame, it’s Cinder herself for coercing him into doing her bidding. Yet Rooster Teeth continued to rely on this narrative, with Miles doubling down on Neo’s hatred of Ruby just when it seemed that the only sensible next step post-Volume 8 (after Cinder sent her falling into the void) was to finally snap out of it and point her vendetta in the right direction.

Cue a long-winded torture scene in which a 17-year-old girl is brutally beaten half to death and mentally abused with the explicit goal of making her end her own life.

At this point, it almost seems like Miles Luna (who wrote that episode) does this on purpose, only bothering to try and redeem female characters after they’ve already crossed a line as to how easily anyone would swallow that. Neo was easily the most sympathetic of the villainous cast up until that point, motivated by love and tragedy rather than lust for power or murderous sadism, and being explicitly out-of-the-loop on Salem and co. Yet she only gets her redemption after viewers are made to watch her commit stomach-churning acts of spite, hatred, and torment.

And then, she’s swept out of the show. Regardless of the tone, it’s abundantly clear her “ascension”, which would include death of personality no matter what (Ruby’s unexplained special exemption status notwithstanding), is not meant to come with an actual return. Much like other characters before her, Neo was swept out of the story once it was decided they couldn’t squeeze her for any more juice, rather than writing with any more care or regard for her character or the show’s future.

Tyrian Callows

There’s not much I can say for this character that I haven’t already said for Mercury, as both lack a sympathetic narrative and are essentially played up as one-note killers for hire. However, while Mercury has some sympathetic elements and has a demeanor that attracts fans, Tyrian consistently pissed me off rather than intrigue me, both because his ‘cackling madman’ personality was horrendously overplayed without any real villainous acts to back it up, and also because Miles expressed his homophobia through Tyrian, enforcing his ‘creepy villain’ portrayal by having him express unwanted advances and framing his contact with others in a sexual manner, most often with Mercury. This coming alongside the most paper-thin and half-assed attempts at LGBT inclusion (and always with women) that Miles could come up with throughout Volumes 5 and 6, and I damn near lost my mind with rage.

Like everyone else, he fares much better in Volume 7 than any other time, largely because watching Tyrian go on an unrestricted rampage and seeing what he’ll do to innocent people given half a chance was what he had always needed in order to back up his portrayal. Watching Tyrian’s history unnerve those who are familiar with it, especially just after we’d seen him get his hands dirty, was an excellent move.

Then Volume 8 happens, he’s shooed out, and that’s the end of that.

Ultimately Tyrian’s a very simple character to talk about: he sucked and was annoying for three volumes, was great for one, and then left. There’s not much to mourn as even at his most entertaining, he still lacked a third dimension to him.

Hazel Rainart

Yet another of the great examples of Miles and Kerry throwing out the plot to have their cake and eat it, too. Much like Adam Taurus, one of the great mysteries of this show is what Hazel might’ve actually looked like and felt like as a character had he not been subject to derailment. And yes, I’m calling derailment, because by the end of Volume 5, any and all reason a viewer has to be interested in Hazel, his motivations, or his cause has been carelessly tossed out.

I quite honestly believe the original character of Hazel might’ve been someone who had ill revelations to make about Ozpin, but this conflicted with Miles’ and Kerry’s desires for Ozpin to be treated as upright, and so it was written out and replaced with something that was, in a manner visible from space, not nearly severe enough to be treated seriously.

And after that, what was left? The mystery was gone, and there was nothing interesting left in its place. Hazel essentially does nothing in Volumes 6 or 7, and all he really amounts to in Volume 8 is an assist character to get Emerald onto the side of the heroes before being swept out of the way and dying in Ozpin’s blast from the cane nuke. Every bit of screentime Hazel had was essentially about protecting another character, with none left for his own.

Arthur Watts

Arthurt Watts made his great play in Volume 7, in which he essentially becomes the one villain RWBY ever produced that was great, by way of being interesting, entertaining, and threatening in abundance. Frankly, his character was rather annoying in Volumes 4 through 6, much like that of Tyrian, in that we didn’t really have any reasons to find him scary, nor was there much evidence of his usefulness to Salem to justify his position in her inner circle. Even with the hints and eventual revelation outright that it was him that manufactured the hell virus Cinder made use of in Volumes 2 and 3, essentially overshadowing her as the most effective villain while offscreen, it was just difficult to get into him.

This changes drastically in Volume 7, where it’s frankly like looking at an entirely different character. His very first scene trades the overblown sarcasm and quips for straightforward, analytical precision, and his cold callousness towards innocent lives is established by having him stroll through the streets of Mantle causing collisions without so much as a care in the world, barely seeming to notice the people he’s hurting.

Throughout the chaos of Volume 7, he engineers disaster after disaster with so much ease it’s criminal, and the power he has once he secures Jacques Schnee’s Council security clearance is frightening, to say nothing of how quickly he starts taking advantage of it. The dire feeling of late Volume 7 is entirely thanks to him and he made full, effective use of his time in the spotlight.

So, naturally, he’s killed off in Volume 8, though not forever as he allegedly comes back in a Justice League crossover that no one cares about set after that Volume. Frankly I’m pretty sure that has more to do with Jessie Grelle quitting their VA role as Tyrian and not being easily replaced than any desire to make use of Watts’ own considerable track record as a villain.

Fennec and Corsac Albain

I’m left wondering what the real purpose of these characters are, because it doesn’t seem like there was much commitment to make them interesting—you’ll have noticed that’s a trend.

Obviously, the true spotlight of Volumes 4 and 5 goes to Ilia, the villainess headed for redemption, but they can’t usurp the overarching antagonist role from Adam, either. Fennec and Corsac feel very flat, with them being quite obviously villanous to such an extent that viewers are not going to be fooled by any hand-waving on their parts, yet with no personal antagonism towards or history with Blake to capitalize on. They’re simply too toothless to really get drawn into their parts in the White Fang plot, and they’re not big enough assholes to really feel like they’re deserving of death in Fennec’s case.

Leonardo Lionheart

A strange character to talk about, as the realm of ‘hero turned traitor’ should potentially be offering leagues and leagues of drama that is at least interesting. In the Harry Potter Analogy That Never Quits, he’d be the Pettigrew, with his status as friend to the heroes undercut by treachery and his cowardice compelling him to such an extent that he comes off as depraved and well beyond redemption. And while we do get a little of that, being shocked at the depths of evil Lionheart will sink to to protect himself from Salem, there are critical differences between Pettigrew and Lionheart.

Pettigrew was exceedingly minor, a hangers-on to popular, well-liked heroes of days gone by, ostensibly upright but still overlooked and not considered worthy of a lot of attention up until he turned traitor and failing to notice him becomes known as the critical mistake of a lifetime. Lionheart, by contrast, is the headmaster of one of the heroic academies that teach students to hunt monsters, one of Ozpin’s inner circle and worthy of respect and attention by virtue of that position. As such, a lot of work needed to be shown as to why Ozpin ever liked or trusted him in order to make that stab in the back hurt the way it needed to, but we get no such thing. Lionheart enters the story in the exact way he will eventually leave it: his first scene establishes him as a mole on Salem’s side, and that’s how he dies a volume later. We hear nothing of the legacy he had before he bit it, only of the false legacy he leaves behind now that he’s definitively dead.

To put the hammer on it, Lionheart’s whole purpose was to be a twisted traitor, but Miles and Kerry didn’t know how to make that good.

Jacques Schnee

Jacques Schnee stands as a testament to Miles and Kerry’s tactics as writers. Being overtly ham-fisted at all times, Jacques was saddled with a disproportionate amount of responsibility for the evils of the Schnee Dust Company, down to making the previous generation a good and pure entrepeneur and making it known that he married into the family for its money, so as not to confuse viewers with the unacceptable idea that Weiss’ bloodline might actually have problematic people in it. None of this truly mattered as long as Jacques made for a good villain, however, and at least in Volumes 4 and 7 where he’s visible, he serves this purpose well enough, being slimy, controlling, aggressive, and egotistic.

But while detestable and with no redeeming qualities, and therefore easy enough to hate, Jacques’ status as Weiss’ personal villain meant that he needed an equally satisfying defeat. Jacques served the same role to Weiss as Adam did to Blake and Raven did to Yang, as the villain that made them who they are and embodies their motivations as heroines. As such, we’re three-for-three on incomplete defeats that lead to the villain being shuffled out of the story.

While Weiss’ defeat of Jacques in Volume 7 was greatly satisfying, it was what Jacques had done with the Schnee name and what he represented that truly needed fixing. As such, what this initial defeat was supposed to hint at in a better story was an eventual return with greater evil ambitions and in turn leading to a greater defeat through which the Schnee Dust Company’s total redemption occurs. The closest we get to this is Whitley’s use of SDC resources to try and run a rescue operation, which ends up cut short due to Miles’ and Kerry’s need to make Ironwood as villainous as possible, leaving the whole setup unresolved by the time they follow that line through to having Ironwood murder Jacques for, and I should stress this, quite literally no reason. Once Jacques dies and Atlas crashes, Weiss’ whole personal quest becomes meaningless, leaving the viewer eternally blueballed thereafter with the unsatisfying reveal that getting her dad arrested for cheating his way into an election was apparently supposed to suffice.

The Jabberwalker

It is quite something to have a clone of a character exist for more scenes than that actual character. The Jabberwalker is essentially a Grimm with a special paint job, with no deeper purpose to the plot despite being possessed of nominal intelligence. Why the God of Darkness created it and didn’t wipe it from existence again despite the threat it posed to an entire dimension’s denizens is a baffling quandary. Because we never find out what the Jabberwalker wants, needs, feels, desires, or what makes it distinct from any garden-variety Grimm, there’s no reason to get invested in it. The only reason it’s special at all is because it’s in a locale where death typically holds no meaning.

Even its name and seeming referential figure is wasted, as you would think an expy of the Jabberwock—a creature summoned by speaking words into a mirror—would have more to do with the apparent self-reflection theme of the volume it appears in, but no. This whole character changes, essentially, nothing about the story in any of its appearances, so it’s a waste of space.

The Curious Cat

The Curious Cat was, as with much about Volume 9, aggravating and inconsistent. Much like with Little, they had a very short attention span, which only served as an annoyance to the heroes and the viewers with them. Nothing about their shady, answer-dodging behavior could really be called intriguing this late into the story when the stakes are very low, and it says a lot that even with a villainous reveal being obvious ahead of time, the eventual direction that reveal took was incredibly baffling on top of uncomfortable.

It’s quite unnerving to see any character, but especially an animal, perched atop a girl in an incredibly alarm bell-ringing way the way the Cat was with Ruby and Neo, and whoever had the idea to essentially have the cat vore his way into Neo’s body probably should’ve been taken out behind the shed. The viewer is given no time to process anything during the Cat’s villainy, jumping from shocker to shocker to uncomfortable camera angle and so on and so forth.

Perhaps even more vile than the late-game twists is how the story ultimately ends for the Cat, wherein they are “brought to justice” in an incredibly heartless manner by the character who had, frankly, done a lot worse: Neo manifests a bunch of monsters out of nowhere to rip the Cat apart and eat it. The flippancy of this astounded me, especially given how Neo—aka, a woman—was handed a free redemption over-write card a minute later. And immediately after this, we’re given one of the worst infodumps in the whole series where the Cat’s story is spelled out for us, essentially telling the audience that the Cat, too, was a victim of personal tragedy and not equipped to handle it, making the stark difference in treatment between them and Neo even more pronounced. There’s no sense of sadness or resolution or closure, just sick revulsion.

In the end, I imagine no one is going to remember this character for anything other than the negative feelings they brought along.

Other Characters

Summer Rose

This was not a character. That’s a pattern you’ll note for pretty much every name in this section, with rare exceptions.

Interest in Ruby’s mother was sparked as soon as the first hint of the series’ existence occurred with the Red Trailer where her grave was shown, and was peaked (not piqued, I said 'peaked' on purpose) in Volume One where the song “Red Like Roses” seemingly spelled out a complicated and tragic story connecting back to that headstone on the cliff, with the cliffside Ruby lands on when decapitating the Nevermore mirroring the one from her trailer.

But unfortunately, any knowledge of who Summer was or what her role in the story was supposed to be was lost with Monty. Summer only gets one little aside from Yang in Volume 2, describing her as an ideal mother, and that much only so she can get to the real point, which is Yang’s birth mother Raven. From there, she’s so unfocused-on in Volumes 4 through 6 that she’s essentially retconned into having died so early that Ruby couldn’t even speak, with her character left to dangle to such an extent that Yang barely seems to remember her in favor of, again, her birth mother. This was just one more thing that agitated fans, of course.

But by the time the writers actually felt like including Summer and exploring who she was, it was too late, as anyone actually invested in her had long since given up. She was re-retconned into someone Ruby both remembered and cared about far too late, and up until Volume 9’s very last scenes, there’s no real hint that Miles and Kerry actually know what they’re doing with her, vague hints that she died fighting Salem (which was, in abundantly obvious fashion, always easy to determine considering how routine and animesque RWBY is as a show) notwithstanding.

In short, the story of RWBY ends with Summer having been nothing but an empty promise.

Glynda Goodwitch

There’s some sort of idea in the first three volumes that Glynda actually matters, doing a lot of talking whenever Ozpin’s section of the story enters a scene. But frankly, even if Kathleen Zeulch hadn’t been fired and thus her character written out, I doubt she would’ve amounted to much. For all her jaw-dropping power, she never seemed to really contribute much except tout Ozpin’s ways as trustworthy, which of course ended up being hilariously erroneous later. As such, she seems to have little role in the story beyond that of a sycophant who cleans up messes.

Cardin Winchester

He existed to be a bully that was then triumphed over, so who cares?

Velvet Scarlatina and Coco Adel

These two are here rather than their whole team because they were the only ones that mattered, for a generous definition of that word. Fox never spoke and Yatsuhashi never made any real difference.

It’s Velvet who we should address first, in that she was obviously meant to be a one-off character even if that hadn’t been said right out of the writers’ and directors’ mouths, but they gave her a team and more screentime because fans liked her so much (because of the rabbit ears). Velvet never really gets a chance to shine on her own terms barring her literal last scene, and the one time she does do something important—cluing Ruby in that something’s amiss in the tournament—it’s not something that couldn’t easily have been accomplished by another character.

Coco perhaps warrants more chatter. Among the four, she was the one who the most effort was spent making her look and act cool and appealing. As such, the One Character Trait allowed to her was “fashionista” and to this aim she was named after Coco Chanel.

Coco Chanel was a nazi.

I do not believe Rooster Teeth actually knew that when they named her, as there’s frequently a difference between common knowledge publicly available knowledge. Vincent Van Gogh suffered from depression and eventually killed himself, which is publicly available knowledge, but I wouldn’t call that something anyone on the street would know.

What is definitely more worthy of scorn is how Coco and her team were utilized down the line. Of course, creating an extra team of badasses and hyping them at the end of Volume 2 made for some of that good ol’ RWBY improvisation, in that it allowed them an already-established team of badasses who could then be worfed to in turn hype Mercury and Emerald as threats. That on its own isn’t bad, except perhaps in shoddy execution, but by the time of 2020, anybody interested in Coco was most certainly not around and not paying to read a comic book about her.

Nobody really wanted a character who was named after a nazi collaborator to be revealed in yet another dubiously-canon small-time comic book to be a lesbian heartbreaker in the same vein as the oh-so-magnanimous Scarlet reveal, and from what I’m told, the portrayal of CFVY themselves didn’t really please too many people either. Much like with SSSN, Coco and by extension CFVY were elements Miles and Kerry refused to write into the show proper but were still willing to merchandise for spare cash with bone throws like this, essentially serving as a testament to wrangle cash out of their audiences without actually giving them anything they wanted.

Neptune Vasilias

Everything I said about Coco and CFVY could easily be repeated here for Neptune and by extension Sage and Scarlet—the difference being, of course, that we know SSSN were designed very early and we can guess that they were positioned to be more influential to the story than they eventually were. I’ve already made repeated mention of the evidence of a schism in Monty-era RWBY wherein it appears like one side wants him involved and the other doesn’t. But if that were the end of it, I’d already be done talking.

Much like Sun, Neptune is subject to an honestly baffling amount of spite by the writers, and I’m singling out Miles Luna on this one. My same suspicions apply—just as I suspect Sun romancing Blake, voiced by Miles’ ex-girlfriend, led to him being punished by being written out, I very much suspect that Neptune’s romancing of Weiss, who Miles ships Jaune with, was unacceptable. Neptune has been completely absent from nearly all RWBY media since 2015, yet time was still made to show him unsuccessfully flirting with a lesbian and, by 2023—long after anyone actually invested in Neptune had left—Miles is still finding time to make jokes at his expense, for seemingly no one but himself to hear. This being the volume where Miles made his move for White Knight, and wrote the Curious Cat “gently” attacking critical fans, I have no difficulty believing that he’d petty enough to continue holding that grudge. It frankly makes me wonder how Kerry feels about the situation.

The White Fang Lieutenant

In another world, this guy might’ve existed for more than three scenes and his grudge against Schnee might’ve been explored, but we don’t live in that world.

NDGO

Ah, now this one I can talk about a bit.

NDGO—those chicks that fought SSSN in the Vytal Tournament and lost—were fan-created characters, with their inclusion in the show awarded to backers of an IndieGoGo campaign, which they earned by giving Rooster Teeth $5,000. I am not sure that number is total or if each individual had to give that much.

Now, this campaign essentially being a RWBY fan’s opportunity to put themselves into RWBY, common courtesy would dictate that you work well with the fans who are responsible for creating them and be as accommodating as possible, after they dropped enough money for a used car for you, and then once their singular role in the story is over, to not touch the characters again without their consultation as it’s not strictly your own intellectual property.

Grace Bono, creator of Nebula Violette, is on record stating that Rooster Teeth were not willing to rig a plus-sized female character, despite the fact that NDGO were based on her and her friends, and some of them were plus-sized, citing that they “couldn’t see needing one” for the show.

Bono herself has speculated that the eventual role NDGO took in one of those comic books CFVY featured in—wherein they frankly behave awfully, allegedly using another student as Grimm bait and generally being assholes—to be revenge for her understandably not being very polite to them when told this.

“Like – imagine telling a young woman she was too fat to be in your ‘strong female characters’ show. I should have been meaner.”

Amber

Amber essentially exists as a placeholder, someone from whom the fall maiden’s power could be stolen from in order to create the situation that exists in Volume 3 where Pyrrha has to take half of it. Her fate is truly horrific, and it’s a bit sad that she doesn’t seem to be remembered by anyone else when all the mourning is going on.

But then, why would they? The characters stopped mourning for Pyrrha once it could no longer be used to benefit Jaune, so it’s not like we expect anyone to remember this one.

Sienna Khan

I know exactly why Ciel Soleil was Miles’ go-to choice of character to demonstrate who over-focused fans with critical approaches latch onto, and it’s because uttering Sienna’s name probably would’ve blown up in his face.

It’s frankly astounding to me that Miles and Kerry, in the depths of their racism, would depict a character like Sienna who embraces controlled violence as rebellion against oppression, and immediately have her skewered by Adam seconds after the latter has spouted off some sort of ‘faunus supremacy’ nonsense that, as I’ve said before, resembled the fantasy of what white supremacists think is threatening them.

This overshadowed any acknowledged realism Sienna might have represented, in essentials saying that while more rational people like her might exist, activism is still bad because of *checks notes* terrorists who like stabbing people and want to take over humanity. Thanks, guys.

Li’l Miss Malachite

I recall praising this character for being interesting and entertaining in her sparse scenes in Volume 6, which is perhaps why she warranted more screentime in the comic book delving into Roman’s history with Neo. I’m sure there’s something there that might matter some microscopic amount, but I’m not reading that comic book to get to it.

She was one of the better one-off characters, so congrats to her on passing this section unscathed.

Jinn & Ambrosius

Jinn and Ambrosius were essentially personified objects with designated roles. Their scenes were always going to be limited to the number of times characters sought to use the artifacts they dwelled within. They were essentially the mouthpieces of the authors, and as such, any criticism of them can be slapped directly onto the writers of the story with even less barrier between them than usual.

As such, there’s essentially no reason to discuss them.

The Brother Gods, Light and Darkness

I really do not care about these two, and you really shouldn’t either.

One of the symptoms of late-RWDE syndrome, as I call it, is being rather miffed that more time wasn’t spent on the gods and developing them as religious figures, with a whole mythology, etc. etc.

That is wholly unimportant. It was never necessary to develop a mythology around the brother gods, for the same reasons it isn’t necessary to develop the mythology of the deities in Zelda games. Any Zelda players out there, compile what you know about the Golden Goddesses.

• There’s three of them.
• We know their names.
• We know one created the planet, we know one created the laws of spacetime, and we know one created life.
• We know they’re associated with fire, water, and earth/forest/wind/electricity/whatever the hell is green in any given game.
• We know they created the Triforce.

What about Hylia, that chick that didn’t even pop up until Skyward Sword?

• We know she opposed Ganondorf back when he was Demise.
• She lifted a chunk of earth into the sky that one time.
• She reincarnated as Zelda.
• She finally, finally gets statues in Breath of the Wild that imply she’s still worshipped on some level. Beyond that, nothing.

The gods of Hyrule have no character unto themselves, and their interaction with the present-day plots usually amounts to little more than being credited with dropping some green clothes or occasionally tools into the hero’s lap. Their roles never change and their behaviors never will either, so any attempts to change their lore largely don’t matter.

There are many problems with The Legend of Zelda, chiefly that it’s too obsessed with its own lore, which the biggest chunk of players truly don’t care about—despite frequent “updates” to the lore with each game, the one thing that has stayed true is that you really don’t have to know much to know it all. And I don’t need a deep-dive into the mythology of the Brothers of Light and Darkness for the same reasons I don’t need it for Zelda—it’s not important enough to bother with. Even the part where they blew up humanity had no real impact because three minutes of storytime later, humanity were restored with no explanation.

And I can firmly say I was right, because when we did get a deep-dive into the Brothers and their history in Volume 9, it changed absolutely nothing about the story and was simply a waste of our time.

I think the reason the odd RWDE-er here and there is so hung up on the lack of explored mythology around the brothers is the same reason they get hung up on ‘worldbuilding’; they watch more of RWBY essayists on YouTube than the actual show, and think elements like this need to be as lengthily detailed as they would be in Dungeons and Dragons or Mass Effect. But those games have that much detail because it’s important to the format, whereas RWBY wouldn’t be able to justify spending that much time on it to begin with. Not every fictional god requires an entire elaborate fictional religious practice to go along with them.

The Brothers are historical characters in the context of their story. I can firmly say that had the present-day cast reacted to their actions in Salem’s backstory with the appropriate horror and anger, then no one would care and these two wouldn’t even have a slot here, since they’d basically amount to a hand-wave to explain why Salem is immortal. The only reason they warrant any mention at all is for how their treatment of Salem gets absolutely no remarks from the cast, thereby painting it as correct and upright, or at least more Salem’s fault than theirs.

Which we, truthfully, already went into on Salem’s slot, so why dwell on it here?

Pietro Polendina

There would be very little point in ringing this ‘Volume 7 good, Volume 8 bad’ bell any further, but we have to.

Pietro is characterized both by his extreme technological expertise and by his love for his daughter. In order to give her life, he had to donate a portion of his soul, which after two donations means that he doesn’t have enough left to try again should Penny bite it again. This fact mattered not one bit to Miles and Kerry, since Penny being on her last chance was never going to stop them from killing her off.

We know from the way Ruby’s grief over Penny was handled in Volume 9 that any attempt by Miles and Kerry to explore it on Pietro’s part would’ve been handled terribly, and most definitely would’ve involved no one being mad at Jaune over it, no matter how justifiable. But I wouldn’t say that excuses sending him falling out of the sky mid-volume and then just...forgetting he exists after.

The Ace Ops & Happy Huntresses

These two groups largely fill similar roles, being vaguely NPC-like characters who orbit around the more important side cast, Clover and Robyn, and follow their orders. Both of them even have the one character who gets a tad more screentime that ends up pissing the audience off. Pick your favorite: Harriet Bree being aggressive and trying to blow up a city on the orders of a deposed general because she misses Clover, or May Marigold expositing about the transphobia she experienced right before her voice actress quit the company due to the transphobia she experienced there.

While the Ace Ops get some decent showings that I praised in Volume 7, it’s undone by Volume 8 rendering them unpleasant and anemic in the character department. Without their fates being followed up on, in the end they just amount to accessories to show that Clover and Robyn were trusted leaders and, in the Ace Ops' case, to oppose RWBY the one time for a fight scene’s sake. These characters are essentially meant to show us the inhabitants of Atlas and Mantle and what they’re like, which I wouldn’t mind, if this feature of them had been enough to actually cry when Vine got blown up for some reason. It wasn’t, though.

Ever After Denizens

And taking the Volume 8 and 9 trend of making everything worse is these. Ostensibly these characters are meant to show us the world of the Ever After and what it’s like, and perhaps they might’ve been able to do that had we not had unskilled writers trying to create an Alice in Wonderland clone and thus thinking that one scene apiece with one personality trait apiece sufficed for most of them.

Not a single one of them was worth the screentime spent on them, with characters like the mice, the Paper Pleasers, and the herbalist being inoffensive but uninteresting at best (at least until you recall how the Paper Pleasers were used to entrench a ‘death as spiritual ascension’ narrative that was hideously done), and characters like the Raccoon and the Red Prince especially being aggravating in the extreme.

In short, they sucked.

The Blacksmith

The final character introduced in the show, the Blacksmith, aka the Great Tree, is essentially capital-G God.

Being the all-powerful creator yet having no goals or desires other than to put Ruby Rose back in the story the way she wants to be (that is to say, unchanged), her character does not, ever, become interesting. Perhaps in a longer story with more time to flesh things out, she would play a larger role, especially as she’s essentially senior to the other two gods who were up until her introduction the highest tier of power and were horrendously guilty of misusing it. But this is RWBY, and the only reason she gives a long-winded spiel confirming that the brother gods are Ever After natives at all is to give the story of Volume 9 some flimsy connection to the world of Remnant. None of it actually matters because no one cares. If anything, her backstory dump regarding the brother gods, the Cat, and the Jabberwalker just make her look supremely uninterested in taking care of the world beyond hitting the reset and/or upgrade button on any denizen that dies.

The best thing we can say about her is that she didn’t blow up humanity, but that’s not a high bar to clear. She has way more screentime than, say, Sienna Khan, but I know you don’t need me to tell you which character audiences got more attached to.

And with that, we complete our Character section of RWBY! Yes, after over 50 consecutive pages of dissection, we are done and can move on!

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RWBY Final Thoughts: Characters (Part I) | Table of Contents | RWBY Final Thoughts: Style