Discussion Characters / RWBYWhiteFang

He never functioned in the story on the scale of the show's actual Big Bad. At best, he functioned on the scale of one of Salem's subordinates, but really he was subordinate even to them. His plot line was also treated as a personal character growth for only two characters and as a sub-section of the main plot. He's covered by General Failure but I don't think his scope was large enough for Big Bad Wannabe.

He tries to be the big bad even though he failed and small scale is what the wannabe part is

Not familiar with the work but I'd agree with that assessment.

I think you've hit the core of the problem there. The trope only seems to be relevant to characters who are normally calm and collected as characters. So, thanks to how calm, collected and sure of herself Salem or Watts tend to be, they'd be candidates for the trope if they begin unravelling due to loss of control and things turning against them.

Adam, however, is unhinged. He has a meltdown every time he doesn't get his way. The fact he has all these mini-breakdowns suggests he's not calm and collected enough in the first place for the trope to apply. The fact he's not mentally stable is touched on a couple of times in the show (particularly by the Albain brothers and Blake). I'd therefore be inclined to say the trope doesn't apply to him, but it would be interesting to see what other people think.

Someone needs a Snickers.

I think you should be grateful the mods only let you off with a simple notifier. There are better ways to hash out your issues with another troper. This isn't one of them.

Perhaps we should add a commented out notice saying to refer to the discussion page before adding either Freudian Excuse and Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse.

When the character pages were rearranged, people wanted the White Fang page kept.

The White Fang is part of the first five volumes of the show. That doesn't change just because long-time fans have moved on to later volumes, and the role these characters play in the show (to date) are based around the White Fang.

Seems like Arena is an official game by the creators, so I see no reason not to use it. It's got my vote.

Might need some thinking about. Someone went through Adam's entry changing the Beauty and the Beast references to Adam being compared to Gaston instead of the Beast, while those Amity Arena cards make it clear the Beast comparison is legitimate.

I don't know the source of the Gaston reference.

I hadn't realized it had been pulled before. My apologies. Does the character need to explicitly use it as justification or can its usage not be inferred, as long as the accusing character rightly calls it out? If the former is the case, I'm fine with your reasoning and won't object to deleting it.

The implications come mostly by proxy. It's effectively Blake who implies the connection between how he's been treated in the past with how he views the world and humanity now. When the audience sees his face, it's easy to make the connection. I think the entry just needs to be reworded. It tends to be written from the audience perspective — us making the connection with his face. However, it's supposed to be an objective trope, meaning we need to be pulling from the show, rather than our perceptions of the show.

What I'm trying to say is something like the following (but I suggest someone else rewrite it to be a better entry since I'm just thinking on the hoof here):

• Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: Blake initially describes Adam as a person who began with good intentions but who descended slowly into a monster, but she is shocked to learn during the Battle of Beacon that Adam has never been interested in equality between Faunus and Humans. She later tells Sun that she believes that Adam is spite personified, seeking to hurt humanity for hurting him. When High Leader Sienna and Adam argue about how the White Fang should be used to obtain equality for the Faunus, Sienna is horrified to learn that Adam reveals that he believes Faunus are superior to humanity and that he wants humanity broken beneath his feet and serving the Faunus. He has to murder Sienna to achieve this goal but his willingness to abandon his men to benefit himself causes even the White Fang to eventually turn on him. It's eventually revealed that Adam has been left disfigured with an SDC logo that has been burned across his face like a cattle brand. When Adam confronts Blake and Yang at Argus, he tries to dismiss his scarring as insignificant compared to the hurt Blake has caused by rejecting him. However, his violence drove her away and Yang observes that Blake only made promises to the man he was pretending to be instead of the man he really was. At no point does any character condone his actions or consider his beliefs to be justified, not even the characters who know of his past suffering.

Based on that, it seems like I was wrong in the first place and it's not an example.

If Adam considers what Blake (in his mind) did to him to be a greater motivation than what the Schnee Dust Company did to him, then he's trying to say Blake is the one at fault, which as you said is Why Did You Make Me Hurt You. I suppose we could say that Blake pointing out that she's not at fault is Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse, but it seems kinda eh.

Second. The trope does not apply since Adam does not use his past suffering — the actual suffering, anyway — as an excuse for his actions. Heck, his stated goals of instilling faunus supremacy and making Blake suffer cannot be logically excused by whatever he had been through. If the writers intended this trope or the vanilla Freudian Excuse to be in effect, then they didn't follow through.

Arryn would be Word of Saint Paul, not Word of God. Most of what you've written there looks like extrapolation or possibly Fridge.

That said, it depends on consensus. Personally, while I've heard that Blake is supposed to be Beauty and the Beast, I haven't heard the writers claim that Adam is Gaston as opposed to the Beast. It doesn't bother me either way. However, given how ingrained it is in the fandom that Adam is the Beast, it would probably help to have a citation.

It might be worth asking this question on the RWBY Forum thread. You'll probably get more responses and be able to judge better whether or not to apply the trope.

Since I got basically ignored there, I'm just gonna go and add the trope. If someone disagrees with me, then so be it.

I agree with Narsisist Adam trope

That's the fandom's theory, but we don't know for now.

Okay, quoted directly from The Dreaded trope description:

Adam is one individual's personal enemy and nothing more and she's overcome her fear of him now, so he was only a temporary source of fear.

The only character in the entire story that classifies as the 'most feared person in the story' is Salem; at least two allies of the Big Good have betrayed him because of their terror of Salem, all the Benevolent Conspiracy members are afraid of her and handle their fear in different ways, the Big Good himself keeps trying to keep her existence a secret to prevent widespread panic and chaos, and her 'creations' have been described as fear itself. The Big Good himself has spent literally thousands of years trying to stop her, and the two allies of his who betrayed him did so because they're utterly convinced Salem cannot be defeated and that the Big Good is therefore just repeatedly getting people killed in a hopeless attempt to stop the unstoppable.

There is no other villain in the story that comes even close to the over-arching plot impact of Salem. Adam isn't even part of her inner circle: he's just a tool she's using for her own ends, and his story impact (in terms of being a feared character) has impacted only two characters at best.

Nope. If anything, the opposite is true. A General Failure is a leader who consistently loses in battle, and thus far, Adam has led his people to victory in every operation he's personally commanded. That he made a single bad strategic call doesn't qualify him as a General Failure; he has to consistently show he's constantly losing to be such.

I think there's an important distinction between Adam leading a team on the field and him giving out the operations to begin with. It's the difference between a Corporal leading his squad on the battlefield and the General coming up with the operation that the Corporal and his squad are fulfilling.

On one hand, he's very good at leading a team after someone like Sienna tells him where to go and who to kill. Once he has his orders, he's very good at commanding his troops and fulfilling them. But now he has the authority to come up with the orders himself, and he's using it to forward his vendetta against Blake to the detriment of the Fang.

He was at his best as Sienna Kahn's attack dog: now that he's off the leash, he's started snapping at things way bigger than he is and he's tunnelvisioned on a pointless vendetta and it's putting the whole pack in danger.

Even his quote-unquote 'victory' at the Battle of Beacon is slowly but surely coming back to bite him: ever since then his actions became harder and harder to justify, and it's all finally come to a head at the battle of the Belladonna Estate. Remember, Kahn was pissed about what he had done.

TLDR: Adam's a fantastic squad commander, but a sucky Grand Leader.

I've asked the RWBY Forum thread and Is This An Example? thread for input as well, to help build up a consensus.

Being a poor overall commander doesn't necessarily make him a General Failure, however. A General Failure is a leader who is regularly and consistently failing, and I don't think we've seen enough of Adam thus far for him to count, since his only grand strategic move so far was the assassination order of the Belladonnas. If we counted everyone who made a single large strategic blunder, we'd pretty much be listing 90% of all villains as a General Failure.

I'd argue to at least wait a while and see if he consistently shows a streak of failures and screw-ups rather than jump and apply the trope to him at the first strategic blunder he makes. At the most, he's a General Ripper right now - a soldier who is overly obsessed with a single thing to the detriment of his troops and strategies. You could make a viable argument that he's an example of The Peter Principle: a competent fighter and leader who got promoted way past the point where he's effective.

The RWBY thread looks like it's come out on a consensus of needing to wait a while to see how Adam's role develops, that we just don't have enough information on him to claim he's the trope.

So, I say we drop it for now but revisit it if we do get information that there's a trend of failure forming.

Should stay there, since it's what we initially know of them.

I personally think that a character’s place on their series’ character pages should be dependent on their current alignment, not their initial, former alignment. I’d like if the Friends and Allies page had a section for Blake’s friends and family consisting of her, Ghira, and Kali. It doesn’t feel right to have Blake’s loving, supportive parents on the Kingdoms page when they have a close relationship with one of the main protagonists.

After thinking it over, I'll wait until the episode is available for non-FIRST RT members, but then Ilia, Ghira, and Kali will all be moved to the Friends and Allies Page. I'm also gonna change Ilia's image to one without her mask, since the mask is a symbol of the WF.

EDIT: And after thinking about it even further, I'm just going ahead with it.

I'd suggest waiting in future until the episode is available to the general public before making a change like this. When you made the change, the episode was only available to paying sponsors. Even today, it's only become available to free account holders. It won't be released to the general public until Saturday (23rd).

However, since you did make the changes, you need to update the Characters page to reflect which page the characters are now on.

I'm not entirely sure. For one thing, the Char Clone page is rather unclear on exactly how explicit it needs to be that the reference was intentional. This is especially true for a western series where Gundam is not a pop culture icon, as explained on that page. As far as I know, aside from minor references like the singer of I Burn saying she's a Super Saiyan and Zwei being named after after Ein from Cowboy Bebop, the only Japanese media that we are positive Monty used as inspiration for aspects of RWBY is BlazBlue, which we know he was a huge fan of. I have never seen anything that confirms Monty watched Gundam (I saw a tweet about him watching a show with giant robots but no specifics) but the trope definition doesn't explain if a coincidental similarity still counts.

As for the trope itself, I am a bit hesitant since Adam only has two of the six universal traits (the pale hair and Cool Mask). I am discounting the association with red since black is his primary color and he lacks any kind of mecha or machine that is red, which seems to be a necessary component as opposed to just connection to the color. It also mentions "Complicated past relationship with someone on the protagonists' side" which is in generally the same ballpark as being a Long-Lost Relative but isn't actually on the list. There are some more specific issues I could bring up but this is getting a bit long already.

Looking at the examples on the page, I think this trope is used too easily. While I will admit it's possible to consider the list connected to Adam as enough, it is not decisive enough for me to consider this trope necessary.

EDIT: Also, you might want to consider taking future queries to the RWBY forum as opposed to the discussion pages. Very few people actually look at the pages and you're more likely to get a better consensus.

I usually do take it to the forum. I start with the Discussion Page and then go to the forum.