RWBY General Discussion

I have 3 sisters and can say with full confidence that Yang is a horrible sister lol. She went full sink or swim mode when they got to Beacon (which kind of hits home tbh) and has spent a lot of time being kind of selfish by prioritizing her girlfriend over her sibling.

This isn't strictly bad writing fwiw, since purple aren't perfect and it helped enable Volume 9. Just kind of funny.

See, when I think "horrible sibling", that requires taking it to Cain and Abel levels.

I think the "sink-or-swim" (loaded term much?) approach worked fine for the Beacon arc. Ruby had already shown herself to be martially capable and able to coordinate their teamwork as a leader, which for a team of fledgling Huntresses is more than enough. Of course, then Beacon Fell, and things had grown way beyond what anyone at the time might have expected.

Blake wasn't comparing Yang to Adam in the V7 scene. She was comparing the slippery slope of arresting good people "for the greater good" with the slippery slope she was on while following Adam, that resulted in having to kill a out-of-control psychopath in self-defence.

Yang's initial take-away from what Blake was saying was that Blake was feeling guilty about killing Adam, which is why Blake had to clarify that she's talking about the slippery slope itself being the problem: you just don't know where you'll end up once you open that door is essentially what she was trying to say. It's realising that was Blake's point that made Yang suggest telling Robyn the truth. Of course, Yang didn't understand that didn't get them off the slippery slope because it meant that now even more secrets were being kept from Ironwood.

As Blake said, there weren't really many good options. Blake's mistake was thinking there had ever been good options to begin with. The big secret Ozpin was really keeping was that there were no good options to begin with and that he was navigating through a maze of bad options insteads.

Volume 9 is the first time a potential good option has been introduced into the story: take the situation (specifically Oscar, Ozpin and Salem) to the Tree. Go over the Brothers heads, basically. The Tree has already told them that the Brothers are wrong, so Ruby now has ammo she can use against the pair. No-one's ever had that option before. There's now an actual solution existing within the setting that the heroes can use once they piece it all together in their heads. The hard part will be getting Salem to the Tree, but the end-game for Remnant is for the gods to learn to leave them alone to create their own futures through their own choices.

Monty wanted both Yang and Taiyang to be the classic anime "the lioness tosses her cubs off a cliff to teach them how to be lions" family (he also made that absolutely literal with Ozpin's initiation test). The western equivalent is "tear the bandaid off" or "take off the kid gloves". But knowing how that goes in real life, I'm not always a fan of it when I see it happen in stories. The Beacon scene was fine. It was pretty standard family and teen stuff... not exactly on Ozpin's level of physically hurling combat students off a cliff on their first day at school.

My headcanon is still that Jaune's Aura and Semblance would have unlocked and activated to save him upon landing had Pyrrha not intervened... thereby ensuring that she would definitely die when fighting Cinder later on instead of having a Semblance-experienced Jaune to keep her pumped full of Aura for that fight.

Edited by Wyldchyld on May 10th 2024 at 2:58:31 PM

Clearly Yang threw her sister under the bus so she could get some thicc cat-girl booty. But let us be honest who here wouldn't?

I wouldn't.

Nice to have you back Wyld

I never really liked Yang much. Volume 5 solidified that by belaboring the fact that Yang doesn't care about Raven when that was the only status quo the story had ever had.

The trope of, "gods are inherently bad and humans need to be free of them", is one I don't particularly like, and the show introducing it after I've gotten emotionally invested in it is... frustrating.

I mean, Raven wasn't exactly a part of Yang's life so why should she care much about her egg donor? And before anyone says it no, watching from the shadows isn't enough.

Also last time she tried to be a mother, she decided to just murder the surrogate daughter and used the powers she took from her to Rape, Pillage, and Burn.

Edited by Psyga315 on May 10th 2024 at 4:56:23 AM

Wow, y'all completely missed what my complaint actually was. I said the show spent to much time repeating an established point. What about that sounded like pearl clutching that Yang hated her extremely obvious Hate Sink of a mother?

While Raven clearly isn't a good person I wouldn't say she's a Hate Sink, i think you're supposed to have mixed feelings on her, she does awful things but we're supposed to realize that she feels conflicted and has some measure of self-loathing for what she's become, it's why that she's supposed to have joined the heroes in Vacuo now isn't an Ass Pull, she's actually got herself together

Need to make your points a touch clearer then cause your post made it sound like you didn't like yang because she didn't like her mother.

Which leads me to ask what exactly did you expect?

Problem with Yang as a character is that she starts out as the "cool big sis/team mom" and as she goes outside the context of being that character (as the other three members of of Team RWBY pretty outgrew the need of her in that role) the layers got peeled back to show her flaws as a person. And that was always the narrative intent for her to ultimately be revealed as a much more flawed person than she seemed at first and to have not had it together as much as she initially appeared to (with being a bit of a hypocrite being one of those flaws).

But they never really got the execution right and the implementation of those flaws in the story, really served to make her unlikable in a way the writers weren't really going for. Thus bumping her down to the second worst written member of Team RWBY (Blake taking the number one spot).

Oh, the joys of Yang. One of my favourite subjects. A character who promised so much, and who has been so consistently written in terms of her flaws, but which shows so little character development to move beyond those flaws that it creates doubt that the writers know what they really created instead of what they thought they created.

The problem with Yang is that the creators wanted her to be Team Mum, but that's not what they created. Yes, she's been "motherly" to Ruby (sometimes, and only in a "big sister" way, not a "mother" way), but she has never been the Team Mum. Not even once. As a result, she's only ever been "sister" and "team mate" at best. Compare to Winter, who actually did give off real "mother" vibes to Weiss in Volume 3, and where the "mother" torch openly got passed from Winter to Weiss in Volume 7.

The person who actually became the Team Mum is Weiss. The seeds with Weiss were planted in Volume 2, openly started being used in Volume 5 through her being the real Team Mum to the alleged "team mum" (Yang), and became locked in during the Atlas Arc for the whole of RWBY and JNPR, which is why the passing of the "motherly" torch from Winter to Weiss in Volume 7 is so important for Weiss's development. She was even giving off Team Mum vibes to Marrow in the montages, and by Volume 8, she's outgrown Winter and is now more of a leader than Winter is. The Volume 8 plan, which the show keeps portraying as Ruby's plan, is actually portrayed to us as being Weiss's plan rather than Ruby's. Weiss is the one dictating details and making it clear she's come up with ideas, with bits of input from Oscar and Whitley along the way. Ruby comes across as adopting the plan, and the person who first suggested getting the Relic, but it's Weiss who ultimately is shown as being the planner and organiser of what they did (given Jaune and Ruby's argument in Volume 9, I'm not sure the writers realised that they depicted this as Weiss's plan in Volume 8, given that they clearly wanted us to believe it was entirely Ruby's plan in Volume 9).

Yang's flaws were openly present from the beginning. We see them in the Yellow Trailer. She has no justification for tearing up the club. It's very in keeping with the Goldilocks tales, where Goldilocks has no reason to tear up the Bears' home either, and the older iterations of the tale were supposed to teach children to NOT be that kind of person.

So, that's already a problem built into Yang's very design. They've based her on a fairy tale character whose role is actually that of Villain Protagonist. Goldilocks is not a good person and isn't meant to be. She's a cautionary tale about why people must conform to society's rules, roles and expectations, especially women (gotta love Victorians). The entire core of RWBY is the very opposite of the Goldilocks concept, which celebrates people standing up for themselves and carving out their own place in life, especially if it means they can defy family or society's expectations of them to become the person they've always wanted to be.

The fact that the messages of Goldilocks and RWBY are completely at odds with each other could have been really interesting for Yang's character journey, especially since Yang is established as being someone who is drifting in life and doesn't have a purpose that drives her. It begs for her to be a very deeply flawed character, and she really is. The problem is that, while some of the flaws do seem to be consciously built into her character and are consistently played, others I'm not so sure about because the writers keep giving her a pass and, after nine volumes, she's shown absolutely no character development to grow beyond those flaws. The Volume 6 falling out with Ozpin (where Maria had to put her in her place), the Volume 8 falling out with Ruby and Ren, all could have been great moments in the path to the self-realisation she needs about how judgemental, intolerant and prone to jumping to assumptions she is.

Unfortunately, the most she ever seems to learn is that she could could have used better communication and that plans don't always work. The core flaws of her character (judgemental, intolerant, prone to jumping to assumptions, etc.) remain untouched and unresolved. That's because some of Yang's self-realisation can only come through the writers realising what they've written with Yang, and while some of it is so consistent that it seems deliberate, I'm not convinced they recognised the rest of what they've created.

Yang has the potential to be one of the greatest character concepts precisely because of her Villain Protagonist inspiration... but I'm not sure it ever fully clicked with Monty, Miles and Kerry that Goldilocks is a Villain Protagonist who exists to teach people how not to be.

I actually think Yang has been handled worse than Blake. I don't think the problem with Blake has ever been her character, the problem for Blake has always been the plot line she's a part of, which is by far the worst-handled plot in the whole of RWBY. Yang is the opposite. The problem has been her.

Edited by Wyldchyld on May 11th 2024 at 11:40:45 AM

I suppose my problem with Yang has more to do with her place in the story than with her character. Back in the first few episodes of volume one, you have Yang trying to get Ruby to make new friends while Ruby just wants to stick with Yang. Now that seems like it'd be setting up for just that to happen with Ruby moving outside of her comfort zone and making friends with her new teammates...but then Ruby gets her wish and ends up on the same team as Yang after all. To quote Steven Universe, "I always get what I want!"

I've always kind of felt that Yang might've worked better if she had just been a side character, Ruby's supportive big sister who pops up every now and then to give her little sister advice, while her place on the team was taken by some other character.

So, about the Volume 9-related entries on the Character pages, I've been thinking: should we consider making them Spoilers Off?

Edited by gjjones on May 11th 2024 at 1:49:27 PM

I've got a question.

Why has a Youtuber's personal interpretation and rant of the animatic been uploaded as examples of objective tropes, as if the personal opinion is the objective truth of the work? Given that the two videos are unabashed mockery and complaining, the only possible thing I can think of that they might be valid examples of (and not in violation of the site-wide clean-up of raw, bad faith complaining) is Caustic Critic instead of Kick the Dog and Designated Villain.

If someone wanted to show there are objective tropes in the animatic, then they can upload straight from the original episode, just like all the other RWBY videoes do.

What do people think?

Edited by Wyldchyld on May 11th 2024 at 6:56:24 PM

Completely agree, they're complaining disguised as video examples

Also, do you think we should consider bringing up the complaining disguised as video examples issue on this thread?

Edited by gjjones on May 11th 2024 at 8:05:37 AM

That was going to be my next question. Basically, my thought process was this:

• Check the RWBY thread to see if other people feel they're complaining, too, and make sure it's not just me.
• If so, go to the complaining clean-up thread and ask if the videos are salvageable as Caustic Critic examples or such raw complaining they should be deleted.
• Take the complaining thread outcome to the video clean-up thread and ask for either redesignation to Caustic Critic or removal.

Edited by Wyldchyld on May 11th 2024 at 7:33:04 PM

Hmm, I'll see what can be done.

Edited by gjjones on May 11th 2024 at 2:41:19 PM

It has already been discussed.

Yeah, but the discussion is if those videos actually have those tropes, they don't it's just Critter is complaining and trying to make it look like they do

No, they do.

The Vacuans throw rocks at orphans to establish how mean they are and then Critter points out how their backstory of being colonized by Atlas makes them seem more like designated villains.