RWBY Spoilers Thread

This would probably be a conversation better suited to the Religion thread, but basically, without suffering what would be our motivation to strive to improve, to innovate, to actively try to do good? And in order to ensure no suffering, that means people have to be programmed to not even be able to conceive of committing an act that could cause suffering to someone else, which brings up the issue of free will, and wouldn't we just be happy little automatons at that point?

A theologian would be able to explain this better than I can, but basically, suffering exists not because whatever creator or creators there are are cruel, but because it's seen as necessary for a creation that is truly sapient with free will.

Edited by danime91 on Nov 10th 2018 at 12:36:13 PM

So would you say it's a bad thing to cure cancer or malaria or HIV or any other horrific disease because it's "playing God" or "devalues life"?

No, of course not, and asking beings more than capable of doing so with a snap of their fingers to do that, and more broadly to reduce or eliminate the suffering of the human condition that they are responsible for creating the first place is not at all unreasonable.

Even if they let everyone into a paradise after death rather than just people who kiss their asses and worship them (and that's assuming there is an afterlife and they aren't just eating the souls of the dead to sustain themselves while claiming they go to heaven ala the Gods in Divinity), that's still needlessly cruel; why make people suffer in the first place? Because it builds character? That's absolute bullshit.

Edited by CaptainCapsase on Nov 10th 2018 at 4:02:30 AM

Said my thoughts on it better than I could have.

Edited by CryoJNik on Nov 10th 2018 at 12:38:38 PM

If you can't handle being outed by a signature, that's on you.

You are absolutely correct. Salem shouldn't be mad at gods for mantaining the natural order of things. Also, the faunus should be grateful that the humans are oppresing them because it makes their lifes more meaningful, Yang should thank Adam for teaching her the value of having a limb and Cinder should be hailed as a messiah for making so many people appreciate life more now that their friends are gone.

I'm being sacrastic, by the way.

Edited by Tharkun140 on Nov 10th 2018 at 9:43:14 PM

Apathy is Death. Worse than Death, because at least a rotting corpse feeds beasts and insects.

No, but if cancer never existed you'd never have people fostering others' charitable motivations to donate to cancer research funds. You'd never have scientists who are driven to excel in the profession in order to try to cure cancer. You'd never have the outpourings of sympathy and empathy shown to cancer patients and survivors.

Free will. Humans chose to treat faunus like sub-humans. Some faunus chose to fight back and turn the tables. It's up to faunus and humans to choose to end that and fight for equality. I'm not saying be thankful for suffering. I'm saying suffering exists in order for people to rise above.

I mean, might as well lobotomize everyone or hook our pleasure centers up to electrodes so that we never have an unhappy thought again.

Edited by danime91 on Nov 10th 2018 at 12:53:01 PM

I could live with that. Can't say the same about cancer.

Apathy is Death. Worse than Death, because at least a rotting corpse feeds beasts and insects.

If horrible diseases never existed in the first place, there'd be no need for generations of scientists to devote their life's work to trying to find marginally better ways to treat such conditions. We'd be more than happy to work on something else, even something purely interesting for reasons of intellectual curiosity rather than real world applications. I can tell you that as a doctoral student focused on age-related diseases.

Moreover, saying all the outpouring of empathy for people suffering from those diseases makes their existence in the first place worth it is frankly insulting. I'd happily trade all the emotional outpouring over my grandfather's likely terminal cancer diagnosis for him not having cancer in the first place. I'd much rather he be able to live as long as he considers his life worth living rather than wasting away due to the natural limitations on human longevity the shortcomings of our biology imposes.

Now I do appreciate that this conversation is kind of getting off topic, but the show kind of raised these issues in the first place by going here.

Edited by CaptainCapsase on Nov 10th 2018 at 4:01:36 AM

...so we can discuss the problem of evil or we can discuss RWBY.

When Jinn said "Ozma," I literally had to pause the video and say "really?" One might even say they've... tipped their hand. (YEEEEEEEAH!)

Makes me wonder why Ozpin was so averse to this being shown - assuming Ozma is Ozpin, he doesn't come off all that badly, certainly not nearly as badly as I'd been expecting. Although I'm not sure that's a safe assumption - are we sure that's even McCormick? If it is, he's definitely closer to his "Washington" voice than his "Ozpin" one, but he almost sounds less even like Washington than like Qrow... and we've seen at least one of his reincarnations take to the bottle...

(Surprised there are no female reincarnations, with that name, unless, like his namesake, the form we were first introduced to wasn't his original; I also can't help but think that, pre-retcon, one of his namesakes screwed the other over.)

...I feel like I'm giving RT entirely too much credit, and they just wanted to shoehorn in another reference, just like "the brother's grimm." Although I think I can give them enough credit to assume it's no coincidence that we've got an entire team themed around heroes who at one point presented as the opposite gender, represented by the opposite gender, now short a member, and now we've got one more.

We've now seen and haven't seen the crowd worshiping Ozpin/Ozma, since we certainly haven't seen it from the angle in the trailer - the camera makes its 180 before anyone bows. (I misremembered the shot of Oscar/Ozpin shouting "no!" but this one I've double-checked was from behind, and with Ozpin/Ozma much lower to the ground.)

Also, I can't help but feel the rebirth of humanity got lost in that story somewhere... although it's interesting that the arrival of faunus was concomitant with humans' large-scale introduction to grimm.

Edited by TwinBird on Nov 10th 2018 at 1:10:52 AM

My posts make considerably more sense read in the voice of John Ratzenberger.

I think what he's afraid of is that a sizable number of people would actually agree with Salem that the Gods are assholes who deserve to be overthrown; I assume she's planning on summoning them back to Remnant to have another go at killing them, that's a lot more interesting a motivation than just wanting to destroy the world so she can finally die.

Even the people who don't agree with that or wouldn't condone her ends justify the means approach of killing anyone who stands in the way of that goal would be likely to give in to despair or be cowed in compliance like Raven and Lionheart after learning that Salem has Complete Immortality and that as long as she's alive if the Gods return they'll find humanity wanting and destroy the world.

Edited by CaptainCapsase on Nov 10th 2018 at 4:15:45 AM

I can see him wanting it kept a secret because it shows Salem can't be killed and is extremely powerful just by herself. If Raven found this out it might be the reason why she thinks its hopeless to fight her.

Probably a matter of scale as well. Fighting Salem to save the world is already a monumental task. Knowing that there's also the issue of either uniting humanity to save it from judgment or taking on the two creators of the world would probably drive a lot of people away. Also the issue brought up before about inciting mass panic and unrest if this truth got out.

Well, obviously Ozpin doesn't want people to think he's a wife-beater. He throws kids off of cliffs for pete's sake. Who knows what he's done to his wife?

In seriousness, I imagine Ozpin also kept this a secret due to the personal nature of it. He's basically trying to raise an army to fight his wife, one who he had kids with.

I also think Ozpin might not be trying to beat Salem, but instead force a stalemate, since she's immortal, and her plan would likely just result in the gods smiting humanity again. And I imagine the prospect of a Forever War wouldn't sit well with potential allies.

That said, how do the silver-eyes tie into all of this?

Edited by RedRob on Nov 10th 2018 at 4:36:39 AM

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet Unless I grew it. In that case, throw it in the trash.

@danime91 Also, the possibility of people agreeing with Salem that humanity should have another go at overthrowing the downright abusive creator gods. If that came to light, there'd be massive societal division about what to do. Ozpin didn't really do anything horrible in his original incarnation contrary to what the last episode gave us cause to believe, but many people would consider him a coward for simply complying with the demands of the asshole creator gods.

Now that I think about it, there must have been some remnant of humanity left after the god of darkness wiped them, since the fairy tale of "The Girl in the Tower", which is about Salem, wouldn't be around if everyone who knew of it died. Unless for some reason Salem or Oz liked to tell the story of how they met to their subjects while they ruled.

And did they really kill the kids during that fight? You know the rule: no body, no death.

Is this where the flashback ends? I was hoping to see some of Oz's incarnation as the King of Vale who established the huntsman academies.

"Mankind, born from dust" says Salem at the start of the series; the dust that rained down on the planet from the god of Darkness destroying the moon is where new humans came from.

Fascinating. Convergent evolution from panspermia, resulting in a species that is almost indistinguishable from the original humanity, except for lack of innate magic. Dunno if Aura and Semblances are something different the new humanity evolved or if it's a "remnant" of their original magical abilities.

So to dissect Ozpin's "How do I destroy Salem", there are few things what come to mind:

• Ozpin is asking how he can destroy Salem, rather than can Salem be destroyed.
• Ozpin is asking how he can destroy Salem, rather than how can he stop her.

Either one can lead to different conclusions.

Pretty obvious observation, but I just wanted to say it.

Continue the bloodline, Fujimaru!

I'm wondering if Salem at some point asked her own question to Jinn "How can I destroy the Gods", and got the same answer as Ozpin.

Yeah, either way I think Jinn is utilizing Exact Words in her answer to that. If the question had been phrased as "How can Salem be defeated?" he may have gotten a useful answer.

PSN ID: FateSeraph | Switch friendcode: SW-0145-8835-0610 Congratulations! She/They

She is a genie. And genies are notourius for that kind of stuff.

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet Unless I grew it. In that case, throw it in the trash.

I'm also wondering if she's editorializing a bit about Salem being turned pure evil by the grimm goo; she certainly seemed genuinely happy with Ozpin after they were reunited, and probably wouldn't have gone all A God I Am if he hadn't suggested they use their powers to unify humanity in the first place. She was after all created by the Gods, and is likely on their side.

Edited by CaptainCapsase on Nov 10th 2018 at 4:55:00 AM

Yeah, Jinn is clearly biased in favour of gods, or at least the god of light.

"Salem, fearing that Ozma would reject her, blamed the end of the world on the gods." Well, yeah. They were the ones to destroy the world. Blaming anyone else would be kind of stupid.

Apathy is Death. Worse than Death, because at least a rotting corpse feeds beasts and insects.

Right...save for the bitter immortal woman who would try to blame everyone and everything but her own hubris.

She gave the order to attack. Darkness retaliated.

Edited by CryoJNik on Nov 10th 2018 at 2:29:11 AM

If you can't handle being outed by a signature, that's on you.

We kind of already went over this; the Gods have yet to present a good justification for the human condition, and are more than capable of alleviating all forms of human suffering. Until they do provide such an answer, (and much more serious people have tried and failed to provide a compelling answer to the Problem of Evil in relation to real world religions) they are not worthy of being worshiped, and overthrowing them would be the moral course of action.

Edited by CaptainCapsase on Nov 10th 2018 at 5:49:53 AM

An Empathy Doll Shot usually negates that. Plus the reactions of the team.

...also, it hits me - we now know that, contrary to what I assumed last week, Qrow and Oscar's human half are along for the ride... what about Maria?

My posts make considerably more sense read in the voice of John Ratzenberger.