RWBY Spoilers Thread

In the absence of any kind of direct evidence, the only reason we have to think that messing with the "cycle of life and death" is in any way inherently undesirable is the word of the God of Light.

So, no reason at all, really.

I can't tell if you're agreeing with me or not, but I concur with the sentiment expressed there; we only have the God of Light's word that messing with life and death is a bad thing; what we've been shown so far suggests the opposite; that for them it's trivial to raise the dead, kill them again, and then resurrect them again.

The show has gotten a lot better this volume about showing rather than simply telling, and I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt there.

Edited by CaptainCapsase on Nov 10th 2018 at 11:55:17 AM

The gods do NOT need a reason not to resurrect people. If that's their prerogative, that's not evil.

They do not CREATE suffering. They even gave the humans magic and choice! If that was the end of their influence, they would be 100% a positive force (unless the magic was then being misused to start hurting people and they did nothing about it, and we have no idea on how much impact magic has on the human's tendency to create conflict).

This is starting to get into Trolley Problem theory, and it should be pretty obvious that not everyone agrees with ascribing equal blame to action and inaction.

We saw one person revived, and we were told that destroying them would correct that. So someone being revived and immediately destroyed (or 'undone') is not enough to draw any conclusion on a lack of consequences. Even the God of Darkness seems to believe it is a mistake, after he's satisfied that his brother isn't just trying to dick him over.

Edited by Saiga on Nov 11th 2018 at 2:59:46 AM

None of that is real evidence. You're just assuming that the word of the Gods is reliable, and everything else about your reasoning proceeds based off of that unjustified assumption.

As it stands, we have no actual good reasons to think anything they say is true, and a number of reasons equal to Remnant's pre-moonshatter population to think the Gods' judgement is flawed and self-serving.

Doubting the Gods is the only rational option.

Edited by Gault on Nov 11th 2018 at 1:17:50 AM

No, I'm not. I haven't touched that at all, and I'm arguing that WITHOUT using the God's justifications they still can't be called evil on what we've seen so far.

Everything I said above is just facts - we know they gave magic and choice to the humans already.

Doubt is one thing - but 'monstrously evil' is not doubting them, it's assuming guilt. As is assuming that the small case of Ozma is enough to declare that resurrection is trivial and without consequence.

So are we not talking about how Ozpin made Beacon Academy in the image of the place he rescued his first wife from? Because if I can't figure out if that's heartwarming or sad.

"What we've seen so far" is the Gods casually enact a total cleansing of Human life from the surface of the planet. But apparently that somehow isn't enough to give us some idea of the Gods' moral priorities.

To contend that the Gods are not "monstrously evil" as Captain Capsase has put it is to admit to having an enormous and unforgivably disgusting double-standard regarding the morality of Gods and Humans. It makes no sense to condemn Humanity for it's fractiousness and violence- as the God of Light explicitly does- and then, as a supposedly moral solution, visit a holocaust upon Remnant so total that the only Human left walking it's surface for untold millennia is the one person you decided to make immortal on a whim as an ironic punishment.

Speaking of which, Salem's curse of deathlessness directly contradicts the God of Light's claim that maintaining the "balance of life and death" is metaphysically important. It must be either trivial or entirely fictitious for the God of Light to so casually violate something he tells Salem is a sacred rule of nature simply for the sake of punishing her.

Edited by Gault on Nov 11th 2018 at 2:03:37 AM

Wiping out the humans who attacked them makes perfect sense. I'm not sure why they wiped out all of humanity, but that appears to be preempting Salem's decision to just lead them down the same path.

They definitely didn't wipe out the humans for fun. They did it in response to the humans' desire to overthrow them and take their power.

And my issue was calling the gods 'monstrously evil' for not resurrecting people, because that's the only thing they've done that wasn't in reaction to anything else.

I also don't think that Salem's curse of deathlessness is a direct contradiction. We don't know enough about the situation to say whether it is, and it was done in order to teach her a lesson. It wasn't meant to be permanent, but so that she would learn to appreciate death and be able to pass herself.

I am kinda curious to what Salem exactly said to the darkness brother that sold him on the idea of bringing someone back to life. Because he was ready to fight his brother over that decision.

Edited by Darthwyn on Nov 11th 2018 at 3:28:50 PM

I think he may have just been so unused to humans coming to him of their own free will (at least without those annoying virgins whose death cries are always so piercingly high), that he was up for anything, at least when he thought he was her first choice. He also doesn't seem to have realized how seriously his brother took the issue.

Edited by TwinBird on Nov 11th 2018 at 1:47:18 AM

So you're giving them the benefit of the doubt for murdering God only knows how many completely innocent people when they just as easily could have revoked Salem's immortality or if they're really THAT dead set on not letting her be reunited with her beloved in death, put her into some sort of And I Must Scream situation where she could never hope to escape from, ie stuck her at the bottom of an ocean or stranded her on the moon where she'd be constantly suffocating/asphyxiating but unable to die?

I also don't think the question of whether inaction and action are morally equivalent is really relevant here; unlike in the trolley problem*, the Gods of Remnant are the ones who set this metaphorical trolley (the human condition) in motion; they created humans vulnerable to the ravages of age and disease when they just as easily could have given them all perfect health forever going off of how trivial it was for them to give Salem Complete Immortality. If they'd instead come across early humans and decided to take them under their wing, you'd have an argument that their inaction doesn't constitute gross negligence, but by creating other sapient beings they are morally responsible for their well being, and deliberately** choosing to make those beings mortal and therefore doomed to waste away from age and disease demonstrates a truly profound disregard for the suffers of others.

* The most common issue people take with the trolley problem is not that it conflates inaction with action, because there are in fact many agreed upon cases where inaction (negligence) is generally agreed upon to be morally reprehensible. The problem is that it simplifies the complicated moral dilemmas we face in real life into something pretty cut and dry but also completely inapplicable to non-contrived scenarios. In real life or well written fiction, people/characters will invariably lack the necessarily time or information to make a fully informed and rational decision about the consequences of their decisions, unlike in the trolley problem, hence it being a dilemma.

** Yes, it's possible they have a good reason for it, or it wouldn't be that easy but nothing we've been shown (and it's clear the show is now trying to Show, Don't Tell more) suggests that to be the case. In fact it's the other way around; they made Salem immortal and repeatedly killed and resurrected Ozma on what look to be whims.

Edited by CaptainCapsase on Nov 11th 2018 at 10:29:18 AM

Never thought I see the day when RWBY could be used to make a Rick and Morty reference.

And the God of light roped Ozpin into this shit. That's the one point where I think Ozpin's come out looking morally grey despite the initial setup*, if he's planning on fulfilling his mission to the Gods, who he knows literally murdered the entire human race as collective punishment after Salem lead a rebellion against them, and have now threatened to do it again if they return and find that humanity doesn't meet their standards.

He's pretty much a good guy, but he works for some very bad people, who are arguably even worse than Salem. He probably doesn't feel like he has much of a choice in the matter, but still.

* Okay that and the phase he went through where he was totally on board with Salem's whole A God I Am thing (and in fact the whole unify humanity thing was something he suggested to begin with), but that's in the past, ans is 100% definitely one of his many mistakes.

Edited by CaptainCapsase on Nov 12th 2018 at 12:44:39 PM

I can't help but be amused that with all the magic and gods and megalomaniacs, what finally triggered the conflict between Oz and Salem was a child custody case.

It's amusing but also kind sad since it ended in a lethal child custody battle.

If the theory about their kids having been the first maidens is true, I wonder if that's part of why Salem didn't want Cinder to kill the Spring maiden. At the same time, it doesn't seem like the maidens retain past life memories or anything like Ozpin beyond simply the powers, so that doesn't really seem to make sense.

So, Ozpin is the Hohenheim to Salem's Dante.

Not familiar.

Full Metal Alchemist 2003. Anime only arc due to over taking the manga

Ah. Okay.

Really at this point for me the characters that spring to mind for Salem and Ozpin are Lord Asriel and Miss Coulter from His Dark Materials*, and I could definitely see the two of them meeting A Similar End Together. While the whole pseudo-gnostic angle is rather played out in Japanese media, for Obvious Reasons it's pretty rare for western works to go there, and I'm interested in where RWBY plans to go with this.

* The parallels being two former lovers who find themselves on opposite sides of a Cosmic battle between the (self proclaimed) Supreme Authority of the setting, becoming bitter enemies. One is a ruthless, willful, and massively hypocritical Dark Messiah bent on the overthrow of said Authority. The other becomes an agent of said Authority after their counterpart embarks on their Rage Against the Heavens for fairly selfish reasons, and while they start off quite clean they gradually sully their hands with progressively more secrets and dark deeds in the service of their masters, becoming cynical, jaded, and manipulative. Now, Ozpin's a lot more sympathetic than Coulter, both before and after his service to the Gods began, but I like the comparison in broad terms.

I have to say, this episode also does an amazing job at clarifying the reasons behind Raven's attitude (assuming she knows what the audience now does), and why she prefers neutrality and the Status Quo. If we exclude the Fifth Option where both the Old Gods (the Brothers Grimm) and the New Gods (Ozpin and Salem) are neutralized to create a world with no Gods, no Kings, only Man, all of the potential outcomes sound bad.

1. Salem unites the relics, summons the Gods back to Remnant, and triumphs over them. Now Remnant has to deal with an invincible despot with divine powers and a twisted utopian vision.

2. Salem summons the Gods and is defeated, the world and everyone on it are erased from existence.

3. Ozpin decides the world is in a state fit for the Gods' return, and unites the relics. They agree with assessment, and now Remnant has to once again deal with the same celestial tyrants who reduced it to a Remnant in the first place.

4. Ozpin unites the relics, but the Gods find humanity wanting, and everything is destroyed.

Edited by CaptainCapsase on Nov 12th 2018 at 11:24:08 AM

So would what the Gods did to Salem, Oz, and the world count as Disproportionate Retribution?

Edited by Psyga315 on Nov 12th 2018 at 4:30:01 AM

Yes. In fact I'd personally say it all but pitches them straight over into God Is Evil territory, and fully expect them to displace Salem as the main villains sooner or later, because their debut appearance had the both of them flying straight over the Moral Event Horizon in my eyes. They literally committed genocide as collective punishment against humankind because some of their creations rebelled against them, and then they singled Salem out for a fate of And I Must Scream as if that would make her learn her lesson.

I'm just worried Rooster Teeth doesn't have the balls to go to places that will inevitably offend religious sensibilities, because while it's pretty much a cliche in JRPGs and fantasy anime to have the Abrahamic God be the villain, that kind of gnostic-esque/anti-theistic plot is just so much better when its being done by a western work written by people intuitively familiar with the source familiar such as His Dark Materials.

Edited by CaptainCapsase on Nov 12th 2018 at 8:04:29 AM

RWBY Volume 6 Chapter 4 Preview edit: giving a link to the same video if the You Tube one gets taking down [1]

Edited by Ryno_v on Nov 12th 2018 at 7:47:16 AM

Pfft. God Is Evil isn't ballsy anymore. It's old hat.

I'm expecting them to ultimately be villains because that's a well worn cliche, especially in Japanese media which RWBY is heavily influenced by.

Actually having some subtly and nuance to their characterizations would be preferable but I don't want to count on that.

It's a well worn cliche in Japanese media. It's still somewhat rare (if no longer really at risk of bringing down Moral Guardians with any teeth) in western works because of understandable hangups around offending religious sentiments, and the fact of the matter is a certain something is frequently lost when people right about mythologies that they weren't raised with, so there's definitely still space for western works to pull God Is Evil without being too derivative.

It's not surprising we're cutting to the villains in the present day, presumably leading into Cinder being blamed, Emerald trying to defend her, and Salem being rather displeased about that and going into her speech from the trailer, which I'm presuming will contain references to stuff that would have . Now that they have the cards on the table about Salem, they don't have to be all mysterious and cryptic with her.

Edited by CaptainCapsase on Nov 12th 2018 at 8:23:20 AM

You only need to look at the trope page to see it isn't that rare. Comic books love that stuff, as does literature.

And these gods aren't really Abrahamic anyway. Dragon forms, balance of light and dark? The influence is clearly more Eastern than anything else.

And if there is one thing Western media LOVES, it's evil foreign gods.