RWBY Spoilers Thread

Because Salem can still reach them if they move on horizontally, as seen with how quickly she moves her troops to Mistral and later Atlas. Moving vertically might be a challenge for Salem and the reason he's trying to do this is to deny Salem (potentially) two of the relics she needs, one offering infinite creation and the other having a single question that offers limitless knowledge (outside of that one where she goes "lol you can't").

Say all you want about abandoning Remnant, but he kinda has a point with this.

"Not only was his extra security and Army not only were what Salem used to Cause the whole thing, it didn't actually do anything to deter what Salems forces were doing, Cinder got past his security really easily for one, and they got into Beacon even after James came kn of what they were doing at all. "

"Basically what they were trying to do, fight Salem while still having the people think all is well, was already flawed in of itself. But Ozpin did a flawed way of fighting with strategy and competance . " Ozpin strategy and competent cause the whole city to colapse, one maiden dead, one of her student dead and the tower only save because ruby burst a power of her ass.

I mean, preventing Ironwood from reaching out to Theodore was the entire point of sending Watts and Tyrian ahead to Atlas.

Right now, Ironwood's plan is to simply escape with his floating city. He's stated explicitly twice now that he intends to leave the rest of the world to burn. Because he doesn't WANT refugees, since his entire initial argument was that Salem wanted him to bring refugees from Mantle into Atlas so her forces could infiltrate.

So he's treating the rest of the world as potential enemies.

Even if he DID ultimately decide to come back down and reach out to other kingdoms, Ironwood has zero credibility left. He's not only suspected by the world at large of being out to start Great War 2.0, but abandoning Mantle would simply demonstrate once more that he is an untrustworthy ally.

Vacuo would likely tell them exactly where to shove it. The kingdom already hates Atlas and resents being used/abandoned by others. A major conflict in the last novel was that the locals are suspicious of others coming to simply use them, then abandoning them when it gets tough.

Ironwood is EXACTLY the sort of person they hate.

So basically, Ironwood is burning all his bridges and just delaying things. Because abandoning Mantle means losing their supply chain, so eventually their Hard Light shields collapse and the entire city dies from the cold and lack of oxygen. We're explicitly told that the Shield around Atlas maintains their climate. Without a supply chain, that shield will run out eventually and then the entire population is exposed to the upper atmosphere.

Edited by harostar on Nov 23rd 2020 at 5:23:01 AM

@Unkown

That was all after James actions.

Ironwood has a real "fuck you got mine" problem, pardon the swearing. He doesn't care about Mantle - remember when he called it "a couple of city blocks" in V7? As well as the refugee thing. He's trying to frame it as "I need to make the tough choices so at least some people can survive", and he's so afraid of that not being the case (and his having to reexamine some of his choices) that he's willing to kill people who point out that hey, everyone will just die of exposure eventually.

The thing about him leaving Mantle behind that makes it very hard for me to take that away as an unprecedented devastating decision is the way they (vaguely) talked about Mountain Glenn. It doesn't really come across as him going beyond the pale, especially since the show is vague on how large Mantle is.

It just comes across as repeating what people do when the Grimm can't be held back from an area.

Mountain Glenn wasn't the Norm tho, it was one of the worst tragedies in vale and as Bonus stuff has shown was also orchestrated by a Grimm obsessed egomaniac.

"That was all after James actions. "

That was before and after james, at all inder counter james by having something he didnt see coming(the virus, made by Watts, who was dead acording to everyone), but amber and the breach is all ozpin responsability.

Cinder didnt need james to wreack everything, she one the moment she inflitrate vale and single phyrras the correct candidate for the next maiden and all that is on ozpin.

"I mean, preventing Ironwood from reaching out to Theodore was the entire point of sending Watts and Tyrian ahead to Atlas. "

is more preventing ozpin to reach both, she know he is the guy who can make both form a coherent aliance which is why I think she want to destroy the towers.

Well we have establishing shots to show that Mantle is considerably smaller than the land mass that Atlas is on, but the city areas on Atlas aren't very large, only cover a small portion of the rock and seem less densely packed. So I would assume between itself and the crater, Mantle is more heavily populated than Atlas.

"Cinder didnt need james to wreack everything, she one the moment she inflitrate vale and single phyrras the correct candidate for the next maiden and all that is on ozpin."

No she hadn't already won then, she needed to set up a whole narrative in order to actually cause the fall of Beacon

She already got that with the breach and yang atacking mercury, if it wasnt for penny she will just swich to another one, penny wasnt in the plan and she include anyway.

It wasn't just penny, it was James having come in with the army that let her set up her whole narrative about the Kingdoms being on the Brink of war.

While losing a settlement isn't unusual, those are small villages and other isolated areas. Mantle is the formal capital of a kingdom and one of the largest population centers on the planet.

Mountain Glenn was a historic event, a tragedy that shook the kingdom. Really, until the Fall of Beacon, it was the worst thing to happen to the kingdom in decades.

Beyond that, it seems that even when settlements are lost the people are not necessarily all killed. What is happening in Mantle is the intentional abandonment of a major population center, leaving them to die of hypothermia or Grimm attacks. That seems to be unusual, because even in VACUO it's typically "We lost our homes and now we have to find somewhere else to live". The priority in ALL CASES, whether in Vacuo or Anima or at Beacon, was to ensure the survival of the people.

Ironwood has since Beacon increasingly abandoned others, slowly tightening the circle. He started out withdrawing his forces from other kingdoms. Then, when Winter reported signs of an upcoming attack on Haven....Ironwood completely withdraws all his forces and closes the borders. He explicitly tells Jacques that Leo won't be able to handle an attack, so Ironwood writes Haven off and does nothing to prevent the loss of a second Academy and Relic.

So he's closed his borders and he's putting Mantle on to increasingly tight lockdowns. Then, when Cinder leaves him the chess piece, he decides Mantle is now a potential threat and abandons it.

He's increasingly just closing himself off, trying to protect himself and his army with zero concern about anything else. He's telling himself that he cares about saving Humanity, that he's preventing Salem from getting a Relic and making sure some people will survive. But.....honestly, based on his pattern, sooner or later he's going to narrow things down again. He's going to continue isolating himself, until there's nothing and no one left.

I kind of hope it's one of the main heroes who ends up taking down Watts.

For Watts it's all about his vendetta with Ironwood and to lesser extent Pietro. To that end it would be quite the karmic humiliation for someone who's effectively an outsider to his feud, to be the one to foil him and deny his vengeance. Going down to his nemesis is one thing, but being to denied the chance to settle things one way or the other would be the most fitting karma for someone like him.

Edited by Gaogaigar54 on Nov 23rd 2020 at 3:41:46 AM

I like that idea, let's roll with that for a little.

Ironwood, to me, is a man dominated by fear. He brought the ships to Beacon because they made him feel safe, for example. Everything he's done is to protect an idea of "us", which has been shrinking throughout the series. You see this in the withdrawal of troops - the rest of Remnant is slowly being excluded from the idea of "us". When Winter reported signs of an attack at Haven, he excludes it completely and withdraws all his troops to protect "us". He slowly excludes Mantle from "us" via the lockdowns, signaling that he doesn't see them the same as he sees his fellow Atlesians. As he strives to protect what he thinks is important, his fear keeps making him shrink the definition of "us" ever smaller. You can see this sort of logic when he stops the evacuation of refugees - all is going fine and dandy until Cinder drops the chess piece. That stokes the fear that the group of "us" has been infiltrated once by Salem, with this influx of unknown people it might happen again! So he stops the evacuation. The refugees have been suspected of possibly being spies for Salem, ergo they are excluded from "us".

The problem with this, of course, is that he's letting that fear control him - his lizard-brain if you will, his instincts. When you see other people in danger, your instinctive reaction is not to help them, it is "can this hurt me" and possibly a rationalization that "if I help, I might get hurt" during or after the fact. The heroes overcome that - they regularly and consciously put themselves in danger to help people who can't help themselves and are either hurt or about to be in the next five seconds, even there is the very real possibility that by doing so they will get mauled by Grimm. In the same vein, Ironwood is perfectly capable of helping the rest of Remnant, he's just letting that fear of "can this hurt me?" control him and dominate his actions. He can't overcome that initial reaction because he's so focused on protecting "us", and if there's the possibility of "us" getting hurt then he, in his mind, has failed to protect Atlas and its people, and after all he's done he can't handle the knowledge of failure.

(Side note about isolationism: Ironwood is solely in charge of Atlas, sure, but Atlas is a part of the larger world - when Atlas has that kind of military power, it could be used to protect the rest of "us" from threats instead of focusing on one region, thereby making the world more stable and Atlas more stable by extension and making one of the problems Ironwood is so stubborn about a bit smaller. It's called good foreign policy, and Ironwood sucks at it hard.)

I should also note that this rationalization applies to the reasoning he's built up in his head - the "I have to make the hard choices so some people can live and it's my responsibility to do it" thinking. He's afraid of people questioning the "hard" choices he made - having troops in Mantle, for example - so he rationalizes because he's afraid of asking himself the question "was [x decision] necessary?" and he doesn't want other people asking that question either. So he rationalizes - withdrawing troops? Atlas is more important! Stopping the evacuation of refugees? Salem might have a spy somewhere in the crowd! Et cetera. He doesn't want to admit that those decisions weren't necessary, because he wants to see himself as in the right, and admitting that he didn't have to do the horrible things that he did hurts that view of himself. Ironwood is trying to be The Hero, but he isn't, so he rationalizes his terrible actions away so he can feel like one, and he denies any attempt by others to make him question his belief in himself as such. Again, he's too afraid to think about the possibility that despite - or even because of - the measures he's taken, he isn't in the right.

On a side note, that paragraph is the most Spec Ops: The Line thing I've written all day, and I'm slightly concerned that I'm making that parallel.

Fantastic breakdown running with my ramblings.

I mean ironwood is a military men and he think in that way, except salem cant be beat by that, in a way salem IS a exitencial fear: something so inhuman, that can outlast not just you but all around you is.....

I mean you can said salem is a humanoid abomination a this point.

While Salem does rely on narratives to stay seen as a force of nature, it is also true that some of the most inhuman things about people is how human they are.

And Salem is that to a T. And mankind itself is a force of nature capable of bringing a planet to ruin, so it helps push that narrative because she is that spiteful she'd doom everyone.

Edited by OmegaRadiance on Nov 23rd 2020 at 4:52:14 AM

Thanks very much I didn't realize how long it was until I posted it

Exactly. Salem is (even more of) an Outside-Context Problem for Ironwood because he can't defeat her like he can a conventional enemy. That "can it hurt me?" instinct overrides everything else and he starts ignoring everything else that is also being hurt, and the group of people defined as "us" starts shrinking. He can't deal with her in part because Salem exploits the fact that he's excluding people and not paying attention to them anymore.

Well said, and in a shorter time than it took me to ramble on about rationalization

Even without the "abandon Mantle" thing, Atlas has a hard time convincing Vacuo to help because of that aforementioned "accused for nearly starting Great War II" thing. Hell, given their Might Makes Right mentality, Vacuo would just shrug with Mantle being thrown to the wolves as they go "sink or swim, bitch."

And even if he or Ruby get the CCT up, what then? How the hell would they be able to convince Vacuo to help? Reach out to Theodore? Yeah, but then you realize that he's just one person on the council and that, outside of Ironwood who seemingly circumvented the system by sheer luck, it's hard for a Headmaster to convince the Council anything. Ozpin was on thin ice with his council and Lionheart's excuse about convincing the council he needs Huntsmen was convincing enough for Qrow to go "seems legit".

Vale and Mistral's forces are scattered no thanks to Salem's schemes and Menagerie is tucked away into the corner to be of any important factor. And that's not even factoring in the condition Atlas could be in once the CCT comes up. If it's a smoldering mess when it comes up, welp, you just showed the world that Salem is not only real, but has destroyed three Kingdoms by this point. If it's still stationary? Again, good f-ing luck convincing people that the Kingdom with the robots that shot everyone and made robots that look like humans need help.

No matter how they slice it, Salem has not put everyone in check. She placed them in checkmate.

Vacuo dosent have a council, they blew it up. It's just Theo running things there.

And Rubies plan isn't just about getting help, its about warning the rest of remnant for the future. Basically ensuring they still have a chance for the war even if Salem wins this battle

Edited by Snoketrope on Nov 23rd 2020 at 5:10:20 AM

Good. Ozpin's mistake in creating governments in the war to fight the evil that is Salem was creating a system where people can stonewall any progress towards fighting Salem.

"And Rubies plan isn't just about getting help, its about warning the rest of remnant for the future. Basically ensuring they still have a chance for the war even if Salem wins this battle "

Which is still leave the question "What happen to atlas, mantle, the relic and the maiden" in the air, this is a problem.

Well they can't just magic Salem away

Vacuo has a council, it's just their actual importance is nominal. Shade Academy is the only official establishment the people of Vacuo recognize, hence why Theo is regarded so well. It's also why The Crown planned on attacking Shade Academy specifically, since it was quite literally the only thing in their way from ruling.

And yeah, a lot of Ozpin's plans hinged on relying on the idea humanity and faunus can work together and the inherent "good" nature of humanity and faunus. The councils, the huntsmen, emphasis of "choice", all of it was done since Ozpin had faith people would do the right thing.

Problem of course being that Ozpin's faith was misplaced, people in general fucking suck, and by time he actually realized it, it was already too ingrained in society to be changed and he lacked any of the political clout he originally had, leaving him trapped in a system of his own design.

Edited by RebelFalcon on Nov 23rd 2020 at 8:39:58 AM